Our paper “Mixed-criticality Scheduling with Dynamic Redistribution of Shared Cache” has been accepted at ECRTS 2017, marking the end of yet another succesful collaboration with my former colleagues at CISTER. The paper proposes an extension of Vestal’s model for mixed-criticality multi-core systems that 1) accounts for the per-task partitioning of the last-level cache, and 2) supports dynamic reassignment of cache portions initially reserved for lower-criticality tasks to the higher-criticality tasks when switching to high-criticality mode. A schedulability analysis based on partitioned EDF is presented that is aware of the cache resources assigned to each task and leverages the dynamic reconfiguration to improve schedulability. We also propose heuristics for partitioning the cache in low- and high-criticality mode. Experimental result indicate tangible improvements in schedulability compared to a baseline cache-aware arrangement where there is no redistribution of cache resources from low- to high-criticality tasks in the event of a mode change.
Paper Accepted at RTAS
A paper entitled “Partitioning and Analysis of the Network-on-Chip on a COTS Many-Core Platform” was recently accepted for publication at RTAS. This paper was a collaboration with former colleagues at the CISTER Research Unit, as well as friends from MDH in Sweden. The paper addresses the issue of interference between applications in many-core platforms interconnected using rate-regulated Networks-on-Chip (NoC), such as the Kalray MPPA. The main contributions of the paper are 1) a partitioning strategy for reducing contention on the NoC, 2) an analysis technique to determine the Worst-Case Traversal Time of packages under the proposed strategy, and 3) a method to determine parameters for the NoCs rate regulators to get minimal WCTT and ensure that buffers never overflow. The benefits of the proposed approach is evaluated both using simulation and by experiments on a Kalray MPPA. Furthermore, an industrial case study from the automotive domain shows the tightness of the proposed analysis.
Article Accepted in IEEE Transactions on Computers
Manil Dev Gomony just had a journal article entitled “A Globally Arbitrated Memory Tree for Mixed-Time-Criticality Systems” accepted in the high-impact journal IEEE Transactions on Computers. This article extends a conference paper published at DATE in 2015 that was called “A Generic, Scalable and Globally Arbitrated Memory Tree for Shared DRAM Access in Real-Time Systems” that was published in collaboration with Jamie Garside and Neil Audsley from University of York. The original paper explained the design and efficient hardware implementation of a transaction arbiter for real-time systems that could be configured to behave like any of five well-known arbiters, i.e. TDM, Round Robin, Credit-Controlled Static Priority, Priority-Based Scheduler, and Frame-Based Static Priority. The key feature of the arbiter is that it is distributed, which means that accounting and enforcement is not done in a single centralized location, allowing it to scale to systems with many resource clients without negatively impacting the maximum frequency at which it operates.
The journal article extends the original conference paper by adding more detail and examples on the design of the memory tree, as well as improving positioning. However, it also extends the scope of the work to consider more complex Mixed-Time-Criticality systems where some clients are more concerned about average-case than worst-case performance. It also considers that the requirements of the clients may be diverse, i.e. that some may have high bandwidth requirements and are latency-tolerant, while others have low bandwidth requirements, but are latency-critical. This is diversity of requirements is addressed by showing how the memory tree supports the transaction arbiter to be chosen individually per client rather than once for the entire system. For example, some real-time clients may be configured by non-work-conserving TDM arbitration to get predictable bandwidth and latency while enjoying complete temporal isolation from other clients, which simplifies integration and certification. Other clients sharing the same resource, may be scheduled using e.g. using a work-conserving Frame-Based Static Priority scheduler to reflect an interest in low average latency while still distinguishing their relative latency-sensitivity. The memory tree supports any combination of the mechanisms discussed above, but we provide a formal analysis of the mixed arbitration algorithm explained above. The article demonstrates the benefits of this approach on a VHDL hardware implementation, as well as its cost in terms of area and power compared to centralized non-mixed arbitration policies by means of ASIC synthesis.
Journal Article Accepted in ACM TODAES
We just received the good news that Hazem’s article “ Reducing the Complexity of Dataflow Graphs using Slack-based Merging” has been accepted for publication in ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES). The article addresses an important problem when working with synchronous data-flow (SDF) graphs, namely that the size of the graph explodes when transforming it to its equivalent homogeneous (HSDF) representation, which prevents any design or analysis algorithms requiring this transformation as a first step from scaling to larger graphs. In the scope of Hazem’s work, this has caused problems when converting an SDF graph into a set of independent periodic real-time tasks.
This article proposes a heuristic algorithm to reduce the size of the resulting HSDF graph prior to analysis by merging actors in the graph, thereby speeding up analysis algorithms using the resulting graph. Three key properties of the algorithm are: 1) it cannot violate the latency or throughput requirements of the original graph, 2) it cannot cause deadlock in the resulting merged graph, and 3) only HSDF actors corresponding to firings of the same SDF actor can be merged to enable the resulting merged graph to be efficiently used by mapping algorithms. The behavior of the algorithm is evaluated with applications from the SDF3 benchmark suite and it is compared to results of an optimal exhaustive merging algorithm for smaller graphs.
Two Papers Accepted at ECRTS 2016!
Two papers have been accepted for presentation at the 28th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2016) in Toulouse, France. The first paper is entitled “Cache-Persistence-Aware Response-Time Analysis for Fixed-Priority Preemptive Systems” as is a collaboration with Syed Aftab Rashid, Geoffrey Nelissen, and Eduardo Tovar from CISTER and Damien Hardy and Isabelle Puaut from University of Rennes. This paper presents a WCRT analysis for single-core fixed-priority preemptive systems that exploits persistent cache blocks that are known to be in the cache to reduce WCRT.
The title of the second paper is “Contention-Free Execution of Automotive Applications on a Clustered Many-Core Platform” that was written together with Borislav Nikolic and Vincent Nelis from CISTER, Matthias Becker and Thomas Nolte from MRTC, and Dakshina Dasari from Bosch. This work presents a contention-free execution framework for automotive applications on many-core platforms, which combines privatization of memory banks together with defined access phases to shared memory resources. An Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation is presented to find the optimal time-triggered schedule for execution as well as for accesses to shared memory. Additionally, a heuristic solution is presented that generates the schedule in a fraction of the time required by the ILP.
New Book Available for Pre-order
Our new book “Memory Controllers for Mixed-Time-Criticality Systems: Architectures, Methodologies and Trade-offs” is now available for pre-order at Springer. The book is based on the excellent PhD thesis of Sven Goossens and discusses the design and FPGA implementation of a real-time memory controller for mixed-criticality systems. The controller can provide complete temporal isolation to its clients as well as hard bounds on the worst-case response time of transactions and the bandwidth offered by the memory. In addition, it provides competitive average-case performance for soft real-time and best-effort applications using a conservative open-page policy. The design is highly configurable and the book carefully quantifies the trade-offs between bandwidth, response time, and power that this enables. To facilitate the discussion about power, the book also presents the power model that came out of the PhD dissertation of Karthik Chandrasekar and gives an up-to-date description of the open-source DRAMPower tool that implements it.
Update: The contents of the book are now available on SpringerLink
Paper Accepted at RTAS 2016
Yonghui Li is on a roll! Two months ago he received the best paper award at ESTIMEDIA for his work on modelling and analysis of a dynamically scheduled DRAM controller using mode-controlled data-flow graphs. Now, he just had a paper entitled “Modeling and Verification of Dynamic Command Scheduling for Real-Time Memory Controllers” that models and analyses the same memory controller using timed atomata. A key highlight of this work is that it quantitatively compares data-flow analysis, timed automata, and two other approaches from Yonghui’s 2015 article in Real-Time Systems in terms of guaranteed bandwidth and worst-case execution time. This gives interesting insights into what these different approaches can and cannot model and what the impact of those limitations are on the performance guarantees. This work was the result of a fruitful collaboration with Kai Lampka from Uppsala University in Sweden.
Article Accepted in Journal of Systems and Software
Congratulations to Anna Minaeva for having her article “Scalable and Efficient Configuration of Time-Division Multiplexed Resources” accepted in Journal of Systems and Software. The article is an extension of our conference paper “An Efficient Configuration Methodology for Time-Division Multiplexed Single Resources” that was presented at the Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS) earlier this year. The original conference paper addresses the problem of configuring a Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) arbiter that provides access to a single shared resource, such as a memory, in a way the satisfies the bandwidth and latency requirements of all memory clients. This is achieved using an optimized Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation.
The newly accepted article extends the problem scope to consider more complex system with a larger number of memory clients and a longer TDM frame. For large problems, the previous ILP formulation takes unpractically long to solve, which is addressed by using it as a building block in a Branch and Price framework to improve its scalability. This approach decomposes the problem into smaller sub-problems and uses more sophisticated exploration methods to navigate the search-space, enabling the number of clients to be increased by up to a factor of 8 compared to the original ILP formulation.
Paper about Data-Flow Modeling of Memory Controllers at ESTIMEDIA
Yonghui Li is having a good month. Last week he was notified that his journal article was accepted by the Real-Time Systems journal. This week, his paper “Mode-Controlled Data-Flow Modeling of Real-Time Memory Controllers” was accepted for presentation at the 13th IEEE Symposium on Embedded Systems for Real-Time Multimedia (ESTIMedia), a symposium that is a part of the Embedded Systems week in Amsterdam.
The paper is a collaboration with Orlando Moreira (previously with ST-Ericsson, currently with Intel) and his PhD students and continues Yonghui’s work on design and analysis of dynamically scheduled memory controllers. This work presents a mode-controlled data-flow model of the memory controller, which is used to derive bounds on the worst-case bandwidth for requests with variable sizes. An important difference with Yonghui’s earlier work is that this paper extends an existing model of computation to capture the memory controller and uses existing tools to do the analysis. This contrasts to his previous work where the analysis was done from scratch and required a lot of manual proofs. Examining this trade-off between modeling and analysis effort and quality of the results is a red thread through all of Yonghui’s work and is expected to be the main topic of his thesis.
Accepted Article about Dynamic Command Scheduling in Real-Time Systems Journal
Today, we congratulate Yonghui Li on his first accepted journal article. The article is entitled “Architecture and Analysis of a Dynamically-Scheduled Real-Time Memory Controller” and has been accepted in the Real-Time Systems journal. The work extends his paper “Dynamic Command Scheduling for Real-Time Memory Controllers” that was presented at ECRTS 2014. The previous conference paper introduced a back-end architecture and scheduling algorithm for a dynamically scheduled SDRAM controller supporting variable transaction sizes and different degrees of bank interleaving. The properties of the back-end was extensively analyzed and worst-case execution times (WCET) of scheduled transactions was derived using two different methods with varying complexity and accuracy.
The newly accepted article extends this work by proposing a corresponding memory controller front-end, along with a complete response time analysis for memory transactions of variable sizes. A key feature of the front-end is that it features a non-work-conserving TDM arbiter, which provides static information about the order in which transactions of different sizes are scheduled, allowing the response time analysis to leverage the flexible WCET analysis of the back-end to provide tighter bounds. In addition, it is shown in which order memory clients with different request sizes should be served to minimize the total response time. The results demonstrate that dynamic command scheduling significantly outperforms our semi-static (pattern-based) approach in the average case, while it performs equally well or better in the worst-case with only a few exceptions.