Real-time partitioned scheduling on multi-core systems with local and global memories

Abstract

Real-time task scheduling becomes even more challenging with the emerging of island-based multi-core architecture, where the local memory module of an island offers shorter access time than the global memory module does. With such a popular architecture design in mind, this paper exploits real-time task scheduling over island-based homogeneous cores with local and global memory pools. Joint considerations of real-time scheduling and memory allocation are presented to efficiently use the computing and memory resources. A polynomial-time algorithm with an asymptotic 4-approximation bound is proposed to minimize the number of needed islands to successfully schedule tasks. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, 82 benchmarks from the MRTC, MediaBench, UTDSP, NetBench, and DSPstone benchmark suites were profiled by a worst-case-execution-time analyzer aiT and included in the experiments.