Hartstone Uniprocessor Benchmark: Definitions and experiments for real-time systems

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to define a series of requirements and associated experiments called the Hartstone Uniprocessor Benchmark (HUB), to be used in testing the ability of a uniprocessor system to handle certain types of hard real-time applications. The benchmark model considers the real-time system as a set of periodic, aperiodic (sporadic), and synchronization (server) tasks. The tasks are characterized by their execution times (workloads), and deadlines. There are five series of experiments defined. They are, in order of increasing complexity, PH (Periodic Tasks, Harmonic Frequencies), PN (Periodic Tasks, Nonharmonic Frequencies), AH (Periodic Tasks with Aperiodic Processing), SH (Periodic Tasks with Synchronization), and SA (Periodic Tasks with Aperiodic Processing and Synchronization). The general stopping criteria of the experiments is defined as follows: Change one of the following four task set parameters: number of tasks, execution time(s), blocking time(s), or deadline(s) until a given task set is no longer schedulable, i.e., a deadline is missed. The derivation of the Hartstone experiments from one static scheduling algorithm (Rate Monotonic) and one dynamic scheduling algorithm (Earliest Deadline First) is presented. Because of its high-level application view of the underlying hardware and real-time system software the Hartstone experiments can be used for fast prototyping of real-time applications. Implementation of such benchmarks is useful in evaluating scheduling algorithms, scheduling protocols, and design paradigms, as well as evaluating real-time languages, the tasking system of compilers, real-time operating systems, and hardware configurations.