Energy Efficient and Predictable Design of Real-Time Embedded Systems
PhD Thesis No. 1127, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, October 2007 (Opponent: Prof. Lothar Thiele, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland).
Prof. Lothar Thiele, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland
ABSTRACT
This thesis addresses several issues related to the design and optimization of embedded systems. In particular, in the context of time-constrained embedded systems, the thesis investigates two problems: the minimization of the energy consumption and the implementation of predictable applications on multiprocessor system-on-chip platforms.
Power consumption is one of the most limiting factors in electronic systems today. Two techniques that have been shown to reduce the power consumption effectively are dynamic voltage selection and adaptive body biasing. The reduction is achieved by dynamically adjusting the voltage and performance settings according to thelection as well as its discrete counterpart. While the above mentioned methods minimize the active energy, we propose an approach that combines voltage selection and processor shutdown in order to optimize the total energy.
In order to take full advantage of slack that arises from variations in the execution time, it is important to recalculate the voltage and performance settings during run-time, i.e., online. However, voltage scaling is computationally expensive, and, thus, performed at runtime, significantly hampers the possible energy savings. To overcome the online complexity, we propose a quasi-static voltage scaling scheme, with a constant online time complexity O(1). This allows to increase the exploitable slack as well as to avoid the energy dissipated due to online recalculation of the voltage settings.
Worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis and, in general, the predictability of real-time applications implemented on multiprocessor systems has been addressed only in very restrictive and particular contexts. One important aspect that makes the analysis difficult is the estimation of the system’s communication behavior. The traffic on the bus does not solely originate from data transfers due to data dependencies between tasks, but is also affected by memory transfers as result of cache misses. As opposed to the analysis performed for a single processor system, where the cache miss penalty is constant, in a multiprocessor system each cache miss has a variable penalty, depending on the bus contention. This affects the tasks’ WCET which, however, is needed in order to perform system scheduling. At the same time, the WCET depends on the system schedule due to the bus interference. In this context, we propose, an approach to worst-case execution time analysis and system scheduling for real-time applications implemented on multiprocessor SoC architectures.
[A07] Alexandru Andrei, "Energy Efficient and Predictable Design of Real-Time Embedded Systems", PhD Thesis No. 1127, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, October 2007 (Opponent: Prof. Lothar Thiele, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland). |
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