Intra-task device scheduling for real-time embedded systems

An ever increasing need for extra functionality in a single embedded system demands for extra Input/Output (I/O) devices, which are usually connected externally and are expensive in terms of energy consumption. To reduce their energy consumption, these devices are equipped with power saving mechanisms. While I/O device scheduling for real-time (RT) systems with such power saving features has been studied in the past, the use of energy resources by these scheduling algorithms may be improved.Technology enhancements in the semiconductor industry have allowed the hardware vendors to reduce the device transition and energy overheads. The decrease in overhead of sleep transitions has opened new opportunities to further reduce the device energy consumption. In this research effort, we propose an intra-task device scheduling algorithm for real-time systems that wakes up a device on demand and reduces its active time while ensuring system schedulability. This intra-task device scheduling algorithm is extended for devices with multiple sleep states to further minimise the overall device energy consumption of the system. The proposed algorithms have less complexity when compared to the conservative inter-task device scheduling algorithms. The system model used relaxes some of the assumptions commonly made in the state-of-the-art that restrict their practical relevance. Apart from the aforementioned advantages, the proposed algorithms are shown to demonstrate the substantial energy savings.     

System level fixed priority energy management algorithm for embedded real time application

Dynamic power management (DPM) and dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) are crucial techniques to reduce the energy consumption in embedded real-time systems. Many previous studies have focused on the energy consumption of the processor or I/O devices. In this paper, we focus on the problem of energy management integrating DVS and DPM techniques for periodic embedded real-time applications with rate monotonic (RM) policy and present a system level fixed priority energy-efficient scheduling (SLFPEES) algorithm. The SLFPEES algorithm consists of I/O device scheduling and job scheduling. I/O device scheduling is based on the dynamic power management with rate monotonic (DPM-RM) policy which puts devices into the sleep state when the idle interval is larger than devices break even time. Job scheduling is based on the RM policy and uses stack resource protocol (SRP) to guarantee exclusive access to the shared resources. For energy efficiency, the SLFPEES algorithm schedules the task with a lower speed and a higher speed. The experimental result shows that the SLFPEES algorithm can yield significantly energy savings with respect to the existing techniques.     

Adaptive cycle management in soft real-time disk retrieval

The objective of this study is to determine the right cycle management policy to service periodic soft real-time disk retrieval. Cycle-based disk scheduling provides an effective way of exploiting the disk bandwidth and meeting the soft real-time requirements of individual I/O requests. It is widely used in real-time retrieval of multimedia data blocks. Interestingly, the issue of cycle management with respect to dynamically changing workloads has not been receiving proper attention despite its significant engineering implications on the system behavior. When cycle length remains constant regardless of varying I/O workload intensity, it may cause under-utilization of disk bandwidth capacity or unnecessarily long service startup latency. In this work, we present a novel cycle management policy which dynamically adapts to the varying workload. We develop pre-buffering policy which makes the adaptive cycle management policy robust against starvation. The proposed approach elaborately determines the cycle length and the respective buffer size for pre-buffering. Performance study reveals a number of valuable observations. Adaptive cycle length management with incremental pre-buffering exhibits superior performance to the other cycle management policies in startup latency, jitter and buffer requirement. It is found that servicing low playback rate contents such as video contents for 3G cellular network requires rather different treatment in disk subsystem capacity planning and call admission criteria because relatively significant fraction of I/O latency is taken up by plain disk overhead.     

多核系统中基于Global EDF 的在线节能实时调度算法

随着多核系统能耗问题日益突出,在满足时间约束条件下降低系统能耗成为多核实时节能调度研究中亟待解决的问题之一.现有研究成果基于事先已知实时任务属性的假设,而实际应用中,只有当任务到达之后才能够获得其属性.为此,针对一般任务模型,不基于任何先验知识提出一种多核系统中基于Global EDF在线节能硬实时任务调度算法,通过引入速度调节因子,利用松弛时间,结合动态功耗管理和动态电压/频率调节技术,降低多核系统中任务的执行速度,达到实时约束与能耗节余之间的合理折衷.所提出的算法仅在上下文切换和任务完成时进行动态电压/频率调节,计算复杂度小,易于在实时操作系统中实现.实验结果表明,该算法适用于不同类型的片上动态电压/频率调节技术,节能效果始终优于Global EDF算法,最多可节能15％～20％,最少可节能5％～10％.     

云环境下超启发式能耗感知调度算法

能耗感知调度的研究对云计算数据中心的可持续发展有着重要意义。能耗感知调度是一个NP难的多目标优化问题,目前云环境下的任务调度算法较少考虑能耗问题,且不能实现对能耗的灵活管理,随机搜索算法是一种解决该问题的有效途径,但其计算开销大,收敛速度慢。将异构云环境下的能耗感知调度问题定义为一个带约束的问题,即在一定的完成时间下优化系统能耗,以实现对能耗的灵活管理。此外,提出了基于在线学习的超启发式算法（OLHH）,该算法结合电压调节技术,在设计了简单高效的启发式策略集的基础上,引进超启发式算法,并采用在线学习的方式跟踪启发式策略的表现,实现对启发式策略的合理管理,从而达到提高算法的收敛性能的目的。模拟实验表明,该算法能够实现系统能耗的灵活管理,且比传统的随机搜索算法有着更好的收敛性能。     

I/O issues in a multimedia system

In future computer system design, I/O systems will have to support continuous media such as video and audio, whose system demands are different from those of data such as text. Multimedia computing requires us to focus on designing I/O systems that can handle real-time demands. Video- and audio-stream playback and teleconferencing are real-time applications with different I/O demands. We primarily consider playback applications which require guaranteed real-time I/O throughput. In a multimedia server, different service phases of a real-time request are disk, small computer systems interface (SCSI) bus, and processor scheduling. Additional service might be needed if the request must be satisfied across a local area network. We restrict ourselves to the support provided at the server, with special emphasis on two service phases: disk scheduling and SCSI bus contention. When requests have to be satisfied within deadlines, traditional real-time systems use scheduling algorithms such as earliest deadline first (EDF) and least slack time first. However, EDF makes the assumption that disks are preemptable, and the seek-time overheads of its strict real-time scheduling result in poor disk utilization. We can provide the constant data rate necessary for real-time requests in various ways that require trade-offs. We analyze how trade-offs that involve buffer space affect the performance of scheduling policies. We also show that deferred deadlines, which increase buffer requirements, improve system performance significantly     

节点能量敏感的容迟/容断网络概率路由算法

针对容迟/容断网络(DTN)中节点能量受限的问题,提出一种节点能量敏感的概率路由算法。该算法将网络中的节点划分能量状态,针对不同能量状态的节点采取有区别的消息转发机制和节能的缓存管理策略,实现消息交付率与网络能耗之间的平衡。仿真结果表明,与其他几种算法相比,该算法能够在低能耗的基础上提高消息交付率并降低网络开销,具有较长的网络寿命。     

Rolling-horizon scheduling for energy constrained distributed real-time embedded systems

Energy-efficient scheduling approaches are critical to battery driven real-time embedded systems. Traditional energy-aware scheduling schemes are mainly based on the individual task scheduling. Consequently, the scheduling space for each task is small, and the schedulability and energy saving are very limited, especially when the system is heavily loaded. To remedy this problem, we propose a novel rolling-horizon (RH) strategy that can be applied to any scheduling algorithm to improve schedulability. In addition, we develop a new energy-efficient adaptive scheduling algorithm (EASA) that can adaptively adjust supply voltages according to the system workload for energy efficiency. Both the RH strategy and EASA algorithm are combined to form our scheduling approach, RH-EASA. Experimental results show that in comparison with some typical traditional scheduling schemes, RH-EASA can achieve significant energy savings while meeting most task deadlines (namely, high schedulability) for distributed real-time embedded systems with dynamic workloads.     

Improving the energy efficiency of data-intensive applications running on clusters

Abstract

As an alternative to traditional computing architecture, cloud computing now is rapidly growing. However, it is based on models like cluster computing in general. Now supercomputers are getting more and more powerful, helping scientists have more indepth understanding of the world. At the same time, clusters of commodity servers have been mainstream in the IT industry, powering not only large Internet services but also a growing number of data-intensive scientific applications, such as MPI based deep learning applications. In order to reduce the energy cost, more and more efforts are made to improve the energy consumption of HPC systems. Because I/O accesses account for a large portion of the execution time for data intensive applications, it is critical to design energy-aware parallel I/O functions for addressing challenges related to HPC energy efficiency. As the de facto standard for designing parallel applications in cluster environment, the Message Passing Interface has been widely used in high performance computing, therefore, getting the energy consumption information of MPI applications is critical for improving the energy efficiency of HPC systems. In this work we first present our energy measurement tool, a software framework that eases the energy collection in cluster environment. And then we present an approach which can optimise the parallel I/O operation’s energy efficiency. The energy scheduling algorithm is evaluated in a cluster.     

NAS设备的磁盘调度模型分析

附网存储 (NAS)设备的性能目标是优化网络存储数据访问和存储子系统的管理 .本文旨在显示随着磁盘转速的增加 ,NAS应该从磁盘硬件的最佳工作性能出发 ,整体配合以提高它的 I/O操作性能 .为了发掘 NAS最佳的工作性能 ,我们建立同时基于磁臂位置和旋转位置的精确的磁盘调度模型 ,并提出测量调度算法性能的方法 .以 HP975 6 0性能参数为基础 ,进行理论分析和模拟测试 .结果磁盘转速越快 ,磁盘访问的开销越大 .因此 ,NAS设备的设计必须从整体上考虑磁盘调度策略的选择 ,并行多磁盘结构的选择 ,文件 cache的分配和文件系统布局等 ,以便提高网络存储数据访问的性能     

Design and Implementation of the Stony Brook Video Server

The system architecture of the Stony Brook Video Server (SBVS), which guarantees end-to-end real-time video playback in a client-server setting, is presented. SBVS employs a real-time network access protocol, RETHER, to use existing Ethernet hardware as the underlying communications media. The video server tightly integrates the bandwidth guarantee mechanisms for network transport and disk I/O. SBVS's stream-by-stream disk scheduling scheme optimizes the effective disk bandwidth without incurring significant scheduling overhead. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture, we have implemented a prototype called SBVS-1, which can support five concurrent MPEG-1 video streams on an Intel 486DX2/EISA PC. To our knowledge, this system is the first video server that provides an end-to-end performance guarantee from the server's disks to the each user's display over standard Ethernet. This paper describes the implementation details of integrating network and I/O bandwidth guarantee mechanisms, and the performance measurements that drive and/or validate our design decisions. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Joint routing, scheduling, and power control for multichannel wireless sensor networks with physical interference

Reliability and real-time requirements bring new challenges to the energy-constrained wireless sensor networks, especially to the industrial wireless sensor networks. Meanwhile, the capacity of wireless sensor networks can be substantially increased by operating on multiple nonoverlapping channels. In this context, new routing, scheduling, and power control algorithms are required to achieve reliable and real-time communications and to fully utilize the increased bandwidth in multichannel wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we develop a distributed and online algorithm that jointly solves multipath routing, link scheduling, and power control problem, which can adapt automatically to the changes in the network topology and offered load. We particularly focus on finding the resource allocation that realizes trade-off among energy consumption, end-to-end delay, and network throughput for multichannel networks with physical interference model. Our algorithm jointly considers 1) delay and energy-aware power control for optimal transmission radius and rate with physical interference model, 2) throughput efficient multipath routing based on the given optimal transmission rate between the given source-destination pairs, and 3) reliable-aware and throughput efficient multichannel maximal link scheduling for time slots and channels based on the designated paths, and the new physical interference model that is updated by the optimal transmission radius. By proving and simulation, we show that our algorithm is provably efficient compared with the optimal centralized and offline algorithm and other comparable algorithms.     

Energy and transition-aware runtime task scheduling for multicore processors

Many embedded or portable devices have large demands on running real-time applications. The designers start to adopt the multicore processors in these devices. The multi-core processors, however, cause much higher power consumption than ever before. To resolve this problem, many researchers have focused their studies on designing the energy-aware task scheduling algorithms for multicore processors. Conventional scheduling algorithms assumed that each core can operate under different voltage levels. However, they have not considered the effects of voltage transition overheads, which may defeat the benefit of task scheduling. In this paper, we aim to resolve this scheduling problem with voltage transition overhead consideration. We formalize this problem by an integer linear programming model and propose a heuristic algorithm for a runtime environment. The experimental results show that the proposed online heuristic algorithm can obtain the comparable results with the optimal scheduling derived by the offline integer linear programming approach.     

An energy-aware self-adaptive System-on-Chip architecture for real-time Harris corner detection with multi-resolution support

The proliferation of embedded vision in today’s life has necessitated the development of System-on-Chips to perform utmost processing in a single chip rather than discrete components. Embedded vision is bounded by stringent requirements, namely real-time performance, limited energy, and adaptivity to cope with the standards evolution. In this article, an energy-aware self-adaptive System-on-Chip for real-time corner detection is realized on Zynq All Programmable System-on-Chip using Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration. A careful analysis of algorithm and efficient utilization of Zynq resources results in highly parallelized and pipelined architecture outperforms the state-of-the-art. A context-aware configuration scheduler application is developed to adhere to operating context and trades off between video resolution and energy consumption to sustain the uttermost operation time for battery-powered devices while delivering real-time performance. The experiments show that the self-adaptive method achieves 1.77 times longer operation time than a parametrized IP core, with negligible reconfiguration energy overhead. A marginal effect of partial reconfiguration overhead on performance is observed, for instance, only two video frames are dropped for HD1080p60 during the reconfiguration time.     

Relieving the burden of track switch in modern hard disk drives

In this work, we propose a novel hard disk technique, “AV Disk”, for modern multimedia applications. Modern hard disk drives adopt complex sector layout mechanisms to reduce track and head switch overhead. While these complex sector layout mechanism can reduce average overhead involved in the track and head switch, they bring larger variability in the overhead. From a multimedia application’s point of view, it is important to minimize the worst case I/O latency rather than to improve the average IO latency. We focus our effort to minimize track switch overhead as well as the variability in track switch overhead involved in disk I/O. We propose that track of the hard disk drive is aligned with a certain IO size. In this work, we develop an elaborate performance model with which we can compute the optimal IO unit size for multimedia applications. We propose that hard disk controller is responsible for positioning data blocks in the hard disk platter in such a manner that I/O units are not placed across the track boundaries, where a single I/O unit has size of 32–128 KByte. Optimal IO unit size is used in aligning the tracks in hard disk drives. We develop Skewed Sector Sparing technique in aligning a track with a given IO size. However, when the I/O unit for alignment is increased to 128 KByte, 17% of the disk space becomes unusable. Despite the decreased storage area, track aligning technique increases the overall performance of the hard disk. According to our simulation-based experiment, overall disk performance increases about 5–25%. Given that capacity of hard disk increases 100% every year, we cautiously regard it as reasonable tradeoff to increase the I/O latency of the disk.     

移动云计算中基于延时传输的多目标工作流调度

云计算和移动互联网的不断融合,促进了移动云计算的产生与发展.在移动云计算环境下,用户可将工作流的任务迁移到云端执行,这样不但能够提升移动设备的计算能力,而且可以减少电池能源消耗.但是不合理的任务迁移会引起大量的数据传输,这不仅损害工作流的服务质量,而且会增加移动设备的能耗.基于此,本文提出了基于延时传输机制的多目标工作流调度算法MOWS-DTM.该算法基于遗传算法,结合工作流的调度过程,在编码策略中考虑了工作流任务的调度位置和执行排序.由于用户在不断移动的过程中,移动设备的无线网络信号也在不断变化.当传输一定大小的数据时,网络信号越强则需要的时间越少,从而移动设备的能耗也越少.而且工作流结构中存在许多非关键任务,延长非关键任务的执行时间并不会对工作流的完工时间造成影响.因此,本文在工作流调度过程中融入了延时传输机制DTM,该机制能够同时有效地优化移动设备的能耗和工作流的完工时间.仿真结果表明,相比MOHEFT算法和RANDOM算法,MOWS-DTM算法在多目标性能上更优.     

开销敏感的多处理器最优节能实时调度算法

嵌入式多处理器系统的能耗问题变得日益重要,如何减少能耗同时满足实时约束成为多处理器系统节能实时调度中的一个重要问题.目前绝大多数研究基于关键速度降低处理器的频率以减少动态能耗,采用关闭处理器的方法减少静态能耗.虽然这种方法可以实现节能,但是不能保证最小化能耗.而现有最优的节能实时调度未考虑处理器状态切换的时间和能量开销,因此在切换开销不可忽视的实际平台中不再是最优的.文中针对具有独立动态电压频率调节和动态功耗管理功能的多处理器系统,考虑处理器切换开销,提出一种基于帧任务模型的最优节能实时调度算法.该算法根据关键速度来判断系统负载情况,确定具有最低能耗值的活跃处理器个数,然后根据状态切换开销来确定最优调度序列.该算法允许实时任务在处理器之间任意迁移,计算复杂度小,易于实现.数学分析证明了该算法的最优性.     

基于SSD数据库负载的SQL能耗感知模型

面对大数据带来的能耗及环境方面的严峻问题，构建节能的绿色数据库系统已成为关键需求和重要挑战。针对现有数据库系统主要以性能优化为目标，缺少对能耗的感知及优化的问题，提出基于数据库负载的能耗感知模型，并将模型应用于基于固态硬盘（SSD）的数据库系统中。首先，将数据库负载执行过程中对主要系统资源（CPU、固态硬盘）的消耗解析为时间开销和功耗开销，并基于SSD数据库负载的基本I/O类型构建时间开销模型和功耗开销模型，实现为数据库构建资源开销单位统一的能耗感知模型；然后，利用多元线性回归实现对模型的求解，并分别在独占环境和竞争环境下，验证模型对不同I/O类型的数据库负载能耗估算的准确性；最后，分析实验结果，并讨论了影响模型准确性的因素。经实验验证模型准确度较高，在DBMS独占系统资源情况下的平均误差为5.15%，绝对误差不超过9.8%；竞争环境下的准确率相对下降，但平均误差也低于12.21%，可有效构建能耗感知的绿色数据库系统。     

A DVS-assisted hard real-time I/O device scheduling algorithm

The I/O subsystem has become a major source of energy consumption in a hard real-time monitoring and control system. To reduce its energy consumption without missing deadlines, a dynamic power management (DPM) policy must carefully consider the power parameters of a device, such as its break-even time and wake-up latency, when switching off idle devices. This problem becomes extremely complicated when dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) is applied to change the execution time of a task. In this paper, we present COLORS, a composite low-power scheduling framework that includes DVS in a DPM policy to maximize the energy reduction on the I/O subsystem. COLORS dynamically predicts the earliest-access time of a device and switches off idle devices. It makes use of both static and dynamic slack time to extend the execution time of a task by DVS, in order to create additional switch-off opportunities. Task workloads, processor profiles, and device characteristics all impact the performance of a low-power real-time algorithm. We also identify a key metric that primarily determines its performance. The experimental results show that, compared with previous work, COLORS achieves additional energy reduction up to 20%, due to the efficient utilization of slack time.

Heuristics for scheduling I/O operations

The I/O bottleneck in parallel computer systems has recently begun receiving increasing interest. Most attention has focused on improving the performance of I/O devices using fairly low level parallelism in techniques such as disk striping and interleaving. Widely applicable solutions, however, will require an integrated approach which addresses the problem at multiple system levels, including applications, systems software, and architecture. We propose that within the context of such an integrated approach, scheduling parallel I/O operations will become increasingly attractive and can potentially provide substantial performance benefits. We describe a simple I/O scheduling problem and present approximate algorithms for its solution. The costs of using these algorithms in terms of execution time, and the benefits in terms of reduced time to complete a batch of I/O operations, are compared with the situations in which no scheduling is used, and in which an optimal scheduling algorithm is used. The comparison is performed both theoretically and experimentally. We have found that, in exchange for a small execution time overhead, the approximate scheduling algorithms can provide substantial improvements in I/O completion times