Scheduling and Allocation in Multiprocessor Systems

The problem of allocation has always been one of the fundamental issues of building applications in multiprocessor systems. For real-time applications, the allocation problem should directly address the issues of task and communication scheduling. In this context, the allocation of tasks has to fully utilize the available processors and the scheduling of tasks has to meet the specified timing constraints. Clearly, the execution of tasks under the allocation and schedule has to satisfy the precedence, resources, and synchronization constraints. Traditionally time constraints for real-time tasks have been specified in terms of ready time and deadlines. Many application tasks have relative timing constraints in which the constraints for the execution of a task are defined in terms of the actual execution instances of prior tasks. In this dissertation we consider the allocation and scheduling problem of the periodic tasks with relative timing requirements. We take a time-based scheduling approach to generate a multiprocessor schedule for a set of periodic tasks. A simulated annealing algorithm is developed as the overall search algorithm for a feasible solution. Our results show that the algorithm performs well and finds feasible allocation and scheduling. We also investigate how to exploit the replication technique to increase the schedulability and performance of the systems. In this dissertation, we adopt the computation model in which each task may have more than one copy and a task may start its execution after receiving necessary data from a copy of each of its predecessors. Based on this model, replication techniques are developed to increase the schedulability of the applications in real-time systems and to reduce the execution cost of the applications in non-real-time systems

Adaptive Multiprocessor Real-Time Systems

Over the past few years, as multicore technology has become cost-effective, multiprocessor systems have become increasingly prevalent. The growing availability of such systems has spurred the development of computationally-intensive applications for which single-processor designs are insufficient. Many such applications have timing constraints; such timing constraints are often not static, but may change in response to both external and internal stimuli. Examples of such applications include tracking systems and many multimedia applications. Motivated by these observations, this dissertation proposes several different adaptive scheduling algorithms that are capable of guaranteeing flexible timing constraints on multiprocessor platforms. Under traditional task models (e.g., periodic, sporadic, etc.), the schedulability of a system is based on each task’s worst-case execution time (WCET), which defines the maximum amount of time that each of its jobs can execute. The disadvantage of using WCETs is that systems may be deemed unschedulable even if they would function correctly most of the time when deployed. Adaptive real-time scheduling algorithms allow the timing constraints of applications to be adjusted based upon runtime conditions, instead of always using fixed timing constraints based upon WCETs. While there is a substantial body of prior work on scheduling applications with static timing constraints on multiprocessor systems, prior to this dissertation, no adaptive multiprocessor scheduling approach existed that is capable of ensuring bounded “error” (where error is measured by comparison to an ideal allocation). In this dissertation, this limitation is addressed by proposing five different multiprocessor scheduling algorithms that allow a task’s timing constraints to change at runtime. The five proposed adaptive algorithms are based on different non-adaptive multiprocessor scheduling algorithms that place different restrictions on task migrations and preemptions. The relative advantages of these algorithms are compared by simulating both the Whisper human tracking system and the Virtual Exposure Camera (VEC), both of which were developed at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addition, a feedback-based adaptive framework is proposed that not only allows timing constraints to adapt at runtime, but also detects which adaptions are needed. An implementation of this adaptive framework on a real-time multiprocessor testbed is discussed and its performance is evaluated by using the core operations of both Whisper and VEC. From this dissertation, it can be concluded that feedback and optimization techniques can be used to determine at runtime which adaptions are needed. Moreover, the accuracy of an adaptive algorithm can be improved by allowing more frequent task migrations and preemptions; however, this accuracy comes at the expense of higher migration and preemption costs, which impacts average-case performance. Thus, there is a tradeoff between accuracy and average-case performance that depends on the frequency of task migrations/preemptions and their cost

Packing Sporadic Real-Time Tasks on Identical Multiprocessor Systems

In real-time systems, in addition to the functional correctness recurrent tasks must fulfill timing constraints to ensure the correct behavior of the system. Partitioned scheduling is widely used in real-time systems, i.e., the tasks are statically assigned onto processors while ensuring that all timing constraints are met. The decision version of the problem, which is to check whether the deadline constraints of tasks can be satisfied on a given number of identical processors, has been known ${\cal NP}$-complete in the strong sense. Several studies on this problem are based on approximations involving resource augmentation, i.e., speeding up individual processors. This paper studies another type of resource augmentation by allocating additional processors, a topic that has not been explored until recently. We provide polynomial-time algorithms and analysis, in which the approximation factors are dependent upon the input instances. Specifically, the factors are related to the maximum ratio of the period to the relative deadline of a task in the given task set. We also show that these algorithms unfortunately cannot achieve a constant approximation factor for general cases. Furthermore, we prove that the problem does not admit any asymptotic polynomial-time approximation scheme (APTAS) unless ${\cal P}={\cal NP}$ when the task set has constrained deadlines, i.e., the relative deadline of a task is no more than the period of the task.Comment: Accepted and to appear in ISAAC 2018, Yi-Lan, Taiwa

A static scheduling approach to enable safety-critical OpenMP applications

Parallel computation is fundamental to satisfy the performance requirements of advanced safety-critical systems. OpenMP is a good candidate to exploit the performance opportunities of parallel platforms. However, safety-critical systems are often based on static allocation strategies, whereas current OpenMP implementations are based on dynamic schedulers. This paper proposes two OpenMP-compliant static allocation approaches: an optimal but costly approach based on an ILP formulation, and a sub-optimal but tractable approach that computes a worst-case makespan bound close to the optimal one.This work is funded by the EU projects P-SOCRATES (FP7-ICT-2013-10) and HERCULES (H2020/ICT/2015/688860), and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under contract TIN2015-65316-P.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Reservation-Based Federated Scheduling for Parallel Real-Time Tasks

This paper considers the scheduling of parallel real-time tasks with arbitrary-deadlines. Each job of a parallel task is described as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). In contrast to prior work in this area, where decomposition-based scheduling algorithms are proposed based on the DAG-structure and inter-task interference is analyzed as self-suspending behavior, this paper generalizes the federated scheduling approach. We propose a reservation-based algorithm, called reservation-based federated scheduling, that dominates federated scheduling. We provide general constraints for the design of such systems and prove that reservation-based federated scheduling has a constant speedup factor with respect to any optimal DAG task scheduler. Furthermore, the presented algorithm can be used in conjunction with any scheduler and scheduling analysis suitable for ordinary arbitrary-deadline sporadic task sets, i.e., without parallelism