Scheduling Independent Tasks with Voltage Overscaling

International audienceIn this paper, we discuss several scheduling algorithms to execute independent tasks with voltage overscaling. Given a frequency to execute the tasks, operating at a voltage below threshold leads to significant energy savings but also induces timing errors. A verification mechanism must be enforced to detect these errors. Contrarily to fail-stop or silent errors, timing errors are deterministic (but unpredictable). For each task, the general strategy is to select a voltage for execution, to check the result, and to select a higher voltage for re-execution if a timing error has occurred, and so on until a correct result is obtained. Switching from one voltage to another incurs a given cost, so it might be efficient to try and execute several tasks at the current voltage before switching to another one. Determining the optimal solution turns out to be unexpectedly difficult. However, we provide the optimal algorithm for a single task, the optimal algorithm when there are only two voltages, and the optimal level algorithm for a set of independent tasks, where a level algorithm is defined as an algorithm that executes all remaining tasks when switching to a given voltage. Furthermore, we show that the optimal level algorithm is in fact globally optimal (among all possible algorithms) when voltage switching costs are linear. Finally, we report a comprehensive set of simulations to assess the potential gain of voltage overscaling algorithms