Dynamic power management under the RUN scheduling algorithm: a slack filling approach

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Effective energy-aware scheduling is paramount for current and future multiprocessor real-time systems, being Dynamic Power Management (DPM) one of the employed techniques. In this paper we extend the Reduction to Uniprocessor (RUN) algorithm making it DPM-compliant. RUN is an optimal multiprocessor real-time scheduling for periodic implicit-deadline tasks and it is known to generate low overhead in terms of preemptions and migrations. It is based on an off-line reduction of the target multiprocessor system into one or more uniprocessor systems. On-line scheduling decisions for the latter is then efficiently translated back to the original system. The developed approach in this paper, called Dynamic Slack Filling (DSF-RUN), extends RUN in two aspects. First, the RUN reduction process is adapted to take into account slack entities, properly defined to represent processor spare capacity for DPM management. Second, on-line scheduling rules of RUN are modified so as to generate long time periods in the schedule by dynamically inserting slacks. Our approach has the same off-line complexity of the original RUN algorithm and takes either quadratic or linear on-line complexity in the number of tasks, depending on the strategy used to compute the maximum allowed idle periods. Results obtained with simulations show that our approach consumes less than 10% more energy than an idealized optimum DPM strategy.