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Run-time Task Overlapping on Multiprocessor Platforms

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Abstract

Today’s embedded applications often consist of multiple concurrent tasks. These tasks are decomposed into sub-tasks which are in turn assigned and scheduled on multiple different processors to achieve the Pareto-optimal performance/energy combinations. Previous work introduced systematical approaches to make performance-energy trade-offs explorations for each individual task and used the exploration results at run-time to fulfill system-level constraints. However, they did not exploit the fact that the concurrent tasks can be executed in an overlapped fashion. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful on-line technique that performs task overlapping by run-time subtask re-scheduling. By doing so, a multiprocessor system with concurrent tasks can achieve better performance without extra energy consumption. We have applied our algorithm to a set of randomly-generated task graphs, obtaining encouraging improvements over non-overlapped task, and also having less overall energy consumption than a previous DVS method for real-time tasks. Then, we have demonstrated the algorithm on real-life video- and image-processing applications implemented on a dual-processor TI TMS320C6202 board: We have achieved a reduction of 22–29% in the application execution time, while the impact of run-time scheduling overhead proved to be negligible (1.55%).

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Notes

  1. The makespan of a schedule is formally defined as the difference between the start time of the first scheduled subtask and the end time of the last ending subtask.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IMEC, Kapeldreef 75, Leuven, 3000, Belgium

    Zhe Ma & Francky Catthoor

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  1. Zhe Ma
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  2. Francky Catthoor
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Correspondence to Zhe Ma.

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Francky Catthoor is also professor of K.U.Leuven–ESAT.

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Ma, Z., Catthoor, F. Run-time Task Overlapping on Multiprocessor Platforms. J Sign Process Syst 60, 169–182 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-008-0302-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-008-0302-7

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