Keep it cool and in time: With runtime monitoring to thermal-aware execution speeds for deadline constrained systems

摘要

The Dynamic Power and Thermal Management (DPTM) system of Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS) enabled processors compensates peak temperatures by slowing or even powering parts of the system down. While ensuring the integrity of computations, this comes with the drawback of losing performance. In the context of hard real-time systems, such unpredictable losses in performance are unacceptable, as they may lead to deadline misses which may yet compromise the integrity of the system. To safely execute hard real-time workloads on such systems, this article presents an online scheme for assigning speeds in such a way that (a) the system executes at low clock speed as often as possible, while (b) deadline violations are strictly ruled out. The proposed scheme is compared with an offline scheme which has complete knowledge about arrival times and execution demands of the workload. The benchmarking shows that for a workload which is always very close to the modelled maximum, our approach performs on-par with the offline scheme. In case of a workload which diverges from the modelled maximum more often, the speed assignments produced by our scheme become more pessimistic, as to ensure that all deadlines are met.