| 1. |
- Nemati, Farhang, Senior Lecturer, 1975-
(author)
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Partitioned Scheduling of Real-Time Tasks on Multi-core Platforms
- 2010
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In recent years multiprocessor architectures have become mainstream, and multi-core processors are found in products ranging from small portable cell phones to large computer servers. In parallel, research on real-time systems has mainly focused on traditional single-core processors. Hence, in order for real-time systems to fully leverage on the extra capacity offered by new multi-core processors, new design techniques, scheduling approaches, and real-time analysis methods have to be developed.In the multi-core and multiprocessor domain there are mainly two scheduling approaches, global and partitioned scheduling. Under global scheduling each task can execute on any processor at any time while under partitioned scheduling tasks are statically allocated to processors and migration of tasks among processors is not allowed. Besides simplicity and efficiency of partitioned scheduling protocols, existing scheduling and synchronization methods developed for single-core processor platforms can more easily be extended to partitioned scheduling. This also simplifies migration of existing systems to multi-cores. An important issue related to partitioned scheduling is distribution of tasks among processors which is a bin-packing problem.In this thesis we propose a partitioning framework for distributing tasks on the processors of multi-core platforms. Depending on the type of performance we desire to achieve, the framework may distribute a task set differently, e.g., in an application in which tasks process huge amounts of data the goal of the framework may be to decrease cache misses.Furthermore, we propose a blocking-aware partitioning heuristic algorithm to distribute tasks onto the processors of a multi-core architecture. The objective of the proposed algorithm is to decrease blocking overhead of tasks which reduces the total utilization and has the potential to reduce the number of required processors.Finally, we have implemented a tool to facilitate evaluation and comparison of different multiprocessor scheduling and synchronization approaches, as well as different partitioning heuristics. We have applied the tool in the evaluation of several partitioning heuristic algorithms, and the tool is flexible to which any new scheduling or synchronization protocol as well as any new partitioning heuristic can easily be added.
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| 2. |
- Afshar, Sara
(author)
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Lock-Based Resource Sharing in Real-Time Multiprocessor Platforms
- 2014
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Embedded systems are typically resource constrained, i.e., resources such as processors, I/O devices, shared buffers or shared memory can be limited for tasks in the system. Therefore, techniques that enable an efficient usage of such resources are of great importance.In the industry, typically large and complex software systems are divided into smaller parts (applications) where each part is developed independently. Migration towards multiprocessor platforms has become inevitable from an industrial perspective. Due to such migration and to efficient use of system resources, these applications eventually may be integrated on a shared multiprocessor platform. In order to facilitate the integration phase of the applications on a shared platform, the timing and resource requirements of each application can be provided in an interface when the application is developed. The system integrator can benefit from such provided information in the interface of each application to ease the integration process. In this thesis, we have provided the resource and timing requirements of each application in their interfaces for applications that may need several processors to be allocated on when they are developed.Although many scheduling techniques have been studied for multiprocessor systems, these techniques are usually based on the assumption that tasks are independent, i.e. do not share resources other than the processors. This assumption is typically not true. In this thesis, we provide an extension to such systems to handle sharing of resources other than processor among tasks. Two traditional approaches exist for multiprocessor systems to schedule tasks on processors. A recent scheduling approach for multiprocessors has combined the two traditional approaches and achieved a hybrid more efficient approach compared to the two previous one. Due to the complex nature of this scheduling approach the conventional approaches for resource sharing could not be used straight forwardly. In this thesis, we have modified resource sharing approaches such that they can be used in such hybrid scheduling systems. A second concern is that enabling resource sharing in the systems can cause unpredictable delays and variations in response time of tasks which can degrade system performance. Therefore, it is of great significance to improve the resource handling techniques to reduce the effect of imposed delays caused by resource sharing in a multiprocessor platform. In this thesis we have proposed alternative techniques for resource handling that can improve system performance for special setups.
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| 3. |
- Lu, Yue
(author)
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Approximation Techniques for Timing Analysis of Complex Real-Time Embedded Systems
- 2010
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- To date, many industrial embedded systems are very large, flexible, and highly configurable software systems, containing millions of lines of code and consisting of hundreds of tasks, many with real-time constraints, being triggered in complex, nested patterns. Furthermore, the temporal dependencies between tasks in such systems are difficult to determine analytically, and they vary the execution time and response time of tasks greatly. We refer to such systems as Complex Real-Time Embedded Systems (CRTES). To maintain, analyze and reuse such CRTES is very difficult and expensive, which, nevertheless, offers high business value in response to great concern in industry. Moreover, in such context, not only the functional behavior of systems has to be assured, but also non-functional properties such as the temporal behavior, i.e., Worst-Case Response Time (WCRT) of the adhering tasks in systems has to be known. However, due to high complexity of such systems and the nature of the problem, the exact WCRT of tasks is impossible to find in practice, but may only be bounded. In addition, the existing relatively well-developed theories for modeling and analysis of real-time systems are having problems, which limit their application in the context. In this thesis, we address this challenge, and present a framework for approximate timing analysis of CRTES that provides a tight interval of WCRT estimates of tasks by the usage of three novel contributions. The first contribution is a novel statistical approach to WCRT analysis of CRTES. The proposed algorithm combines Extreme Value Theory (EVT) with other statistical methods in order to produce a probabilistic WCRT estimate, using response time data from either Monte Carlo simulations of a detailed model of the system, or time-stamped traces of the real system execution. The focus of the method is to give a WCRT prediction with a given probability of being exceeded, which potentially could be considered as an upper bound on the WCRT estimate in systems, especially in the case where conventional timing analysis methods cannot be applied. The second contribution is to introduce a concrete process of formally obtaining the exact value of both Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) and WCRT of tasks in the system model by using upper-part binary search algorithms together with a timed model checker, after a semantic-preserving model transformation. The underline premise is that the size and complexity of CRTES have to be reduced such that they can be manageable by the model checking tool. The third contribution is to apply an optimization algorithm, in this case a meta-heuristic search algorithm, on top of the traditional Monte Carlo simula-tion, which yields substantially better results with respect to tight lower bounds on WCRT estimates of tasks in CRTES. In addition, a number of tools have been implemented and used for the evaluation of the research results. These evaluations, using four simulation models depicting two fictive but representative industrial control applications, give clear indication that the proposed methods have the potential to be both applicable and useful in practice.
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| 4. |
- Åsberg, Mikael
(author)
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On the Development of Hierarchical Real-Time Systems
- 2012
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Hierarchical scheduling (also referred to as resource reservation) is a hot topic within the research of real-time systems. It has many advantages such that it can facilitate software integration, fault isolation, structured analysis, legacy system integration etc. The main idea is to partition resources into well defined slots and the resource itself may be the processor, memory etc. This technique is rarely used in real-time applications, however, it is well adopted in the avionics industry in order to isolate error propagation between system parts, and facilitate analysis of the system.Much of the research within resource reservation deals with theoretical schedulability analysis of partitioned systems, including shared resources (other than the processor). We will in this thesis address more practical issues related to resource reservation. We focus on implementation and prototyping aspects, as well as verification and instrumentation. One of our assumptions is that we deal only with fixed-priority preemptive scheduling (FPPS).The first part in this thesis deals with individual software systems that may have its own tasks as well as a scheduler and it is assumed to be part of another larger system, hence, we refer to this individual system as a subsystem. The subsystem is assumed to be integrated together with other subsystems, but at a early stage, we make it possible to simulate the subsystem running together with the rest of the subsystems. This "simulation`` does not require the actual resource reservation mechanism, the only requirement is an operating system with support for FPPS. This pre-study may be a natural step towards the "real`` integration, since each individual subsystem can be test executed within its assigned partition. All subsystems are assumed to run together using a resource reservation mechanism (during the actual integration). We have developed two prototypes of this mechanism. The first prototype is hand-crafted and it is equipped with a program tracer for partitoned based schedulers. This instrumentation is useful for debugging and visualization of program traces for this type of scheduling. The second prototype is developed using timed automata with tasks (task automata). This model-based scheduler is verified for correctness and it is possible to automatically generate source code for the scheduler. We have successfully synthesized this scheduler for the real-time operating system VxWorks. However, it can easily be executed on most other platforms. Both prototypes has pros and cons. The first version has good performance while the second can guarantee its correctness, hence, there is a trade-off between performance and correctness.
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