Task scheduling on multicore embedded systems under power and thermal constraints

摘要

The trend nowadays is to utilise multiple processors to overcome the limited additional power that can be extracted from a single core. This adds to the challenge of task scheduling on such architectures. Task scheduling should consider the power consumption of concurrently running tasks to avoid going over the maximum power limit. However, often scheduling with power awareness does not guarantee thermal safety. Thermal safety is intended to keep the temperatures of all system components under the maximum allowable temperature at all times. High temperatures can reduce the reliability and the overall functionality of the system. This implies that thermal-aware task scheduling is essential to reduce the system hotspots. In this article, we propose effective solutions to power and thermal-aware scheduling based on an integer linear formulation and genetic algorithms. Results on benchmarks proved the effectiveness and usefulness of our provided techniques.