Predictability of Fixed-Job Priority Schedulers on Heterogeneous Multiprocessor Real-Time Systems

The multiprocessor Fixed-Job Priority (FJP) scheduling of real-time systems is studied. An important property for the schedulability analysis, the predictability (regardless to the execution times), is studied for heterogeneous multiprocessor platforms. Our main contribution is to show that any FJP schedulers are predictable on unrelated platforms. A convenient consequence is the fact that any FJP schedulers are predictable on uniform multiprocessors

Supporting Read/Write Applications in Embedded Real-time Systems via Suspension-aware Analysis

In many embedded real-time systems, applications often interact with I/O devices via read/write operations, which may incur considerable suspension delays. Unfortunately, prior analysis methods for validating timing correctness in embedded systems become quite pessimistic when suspension delays are present. In this paper, we consider the problem of supporting two common types of I/O applications in a multiprocessor system, that is, write-only applications and read-write applications. For the write-only application model, we present a much improved analysis technique that results in only O(m) suspension-related utilization loss, where m is the number of processors. For the second application model, we present a flexible I/O placement strategy and a corresponding new scheduling algorithm, which can completely circumvent the negative impact due to read- and write-induced suspension delays. We illustrate the feasibility of the proposed I/O-placement-based schedule via a case study implementation. Furthermore, experiments presented herein show that the improvement with respect to system utilization over prior methods is often significant

Development and evaluation of a fault-tolerant multiprocessor (FTMP) computer. Volume 4: FTMP executive summary

The FTMP architecture is a high reliability computer concept modeled after a homogeneous multiprocessor architecture. Elements of the FTMP are operated in tight synchronism with one another and hardware fault-detection and fault-masking is provided which is transparent to the software. Operating system design and user software design is thus greatly simplified. Performance of the FTMP is also comparable to that of a simplex equivalent due to the efficiency of fault handling hardware. The FTMP project constructed an engineering module of the FTMP, programmed the machine and extensively tested the architecture through fault injection and other stress testing. This testing confirmed the soundness of the FTMP concepts

Sustainability in static-priority restricted-migration scheduling

International audienceIn this paper, we focus on the static-priority scheduling of periodic hard real-time tasks upon identical multiprocessor platforms. In order to bound the inter-processor migrations, we consider the restricted-migration scheduling policy for which a task is allowed to migrate only at job boundaries. Several jobs of the same task can then be assigned on different processors but a given job can not migrate. It has been shown that this scheduling policy can suffer from scheduling anomalies. These anomalies occur when a decrease in execution requirement of a job causes a deadline miss. We present a static-priority restricted-migration scheduling algorithm and we prove it does not suffer from these anomalies. We also review the scheduling anomalies according to the scheduling tests for this algorithm

Global EDF scheduling of directed acyclic graphs on multiprocessor systems

International audienceIn this paper, we study the problem of real-time scheduling of parallel tasks represented by a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) on multiprocessor architectures. We focus on Global Earliest Deadline First scheduling of sporadic DAG tasksets with constrained-deadlines on a system of homogeneous processors. Our contributions consist in analyzing DAG tasks by considering their internal structures and providing a tighter bound on the workload and interference analysis. This approach consists in assigning a local offset and deadline for each subtask in the DAG. We derive an improved sufficient schedulability test w.r.t. an existing test proposed in the state of the art. Then we discuss the sustainability of this test

Multiprocessor Scheduling of Precedence-constrained Mixed-Critical Jobs

International audienceThe real-time system design targeting multiprocessor platforms leads to two important complications in real-time scheduling. First, to ensure deterministic processing by communicating tasks the scheduling has to consider precedence constraints. The second complication factor is mixed criticality, i.e., integration upon a single platform of various subsystems where some are safety-critical (e.g., car braking system) and the others are not (e.g., car digital radio). Therefore we motivate and study the multiprocessor scheduling problem of a finite set of precedence-related mixed criticality jobs. This problem, to our knowledge, has never been studied if not under very specific assumptions. The main contribution of our work is an algorithm that, given a global fixed-priority assignment for jobs, can modify it in order to improve its schedulability for mixed-criticality setting. Our experiments show an increase of schedulable instances up to a maximum of 25% if compared to classical solutions for this category of scheduling problems

Experimental Analysis of the Tardiness of Parallel Tasks in Soft Real-time Systems

International audienceA parallel application is defined as the application that can be executed on multiple processors simultaneously. In software, parallelism is a useful programming technique to take advantage of the hard-ware advancement in processors manufacturing nowadays. In real-time systems, where tasks have to respect certain timing constraints during execution, a single task has a shorter response time when executed in parallel than the sequential execution. However, the same cannot be trivially applied to a set of parallel tasks (taskset) sharing the same processing platform, and there is a negative intuition regarding parallelism in real-time systems. In this work, we are interested in analyzing this statement and providing an experimental analysis regarding the effect of parallelism soft on real-time systems. By performing an extensive simulation of the scheduling process of parallel taskset on multiprocessor systems using a known scheduling algorithm called the global Earliest-Deadline First (gEDF), we aim at providing an indication about the effects (positive or negative) of parallelism in real-time scheduling

08071 Abstracts Collection -- Scheduling

From 10.02. to 15.02., the Dagstuhl Seminar 08071 ``Scheduling\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available