Mixed-criticality scheduling on heterogeneous multicore systems powered by energy harvesting

Abstract

In this paper, we address the scheduling problem for single-ISA heterogeneous multicore processors running hybrid mixed-criticality workloads with a limited and fluctuating energy budget provided by solar energy harvesting. The hybrid workloads consist of a set of firm-deadline timing-centric applications and a set of soft-deadline throughput-centric multithreaded applications. Our framework exploits traits of the different types of cores in heterogeneous multicore systems to service timing-centric workloads with a few big out-of-order cores, while servicing throughput-centric workloads with many smaller in-order cores clocked in the energy-efficient near-threshold computing (NTC) region. Guided by a novel timing intensity metric, our mixed-criticality scheduling framework creates an optimized schedule that minimizes overall miss penalty for a time-varying energy budget. Experimental results indicate that our framework achieves a 9.5% miss penalty reduction with the proposed timing intensity metric compared to metrics from prior work, a 13.6% performance improvement over a state-of-the-art scheduling approach for single-ISA heterogeneous platforms, and a 23.2% performance benefit from exploiting platform heterogeneity.