On Task Allocation and Scheduling for Lifetime Extension of Platform-Based MPSoC Designs

Abstract

With the relentless scaling of semiconductor technology, the lifetime reliability of today's multiprocessor system-on-a-chip (MPSoC) designs has become one of the major concerns for the industry. Without explicitly taking this issue into consideration during the task allocation and scheduling process, existing works may lead to imbalanced aging rates among processors, thus reducing the system's service life. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose an analytical model to estimate the lifetime reliability of multiprocessor platforms when executing periodical tasks, and we present a novel task allocation and scheduling algorithm that is able to take the aging effects of processors into account, based on the simulated annealing technique. In addition, to speed up the annealing process, several techniques are proposed to simplify the design space exploration process with satisfactory solution quality. Experimental results on various hypothetical multiprocessors and task graphs show that significant system lifetime extension can be achieved by using the proposed approach, especially for heterogeneous platforms with large task graphs.