Optimizing Task Assignment with Minimum Cost on Heterogeneous Embedded Multicore Systems Considering Time Constraint

Abstract

Time and cost are the most critical performance metrics for computer systems including embedded system, especially for the battery-based embedded systems, such as PC, mainframe computer, and smart phone. Most of the previous work focuses on saving energy in a deterministic way by taking the average or worst scenario into account. However, such deterministic approaches usually are inappropriate in modeling energy consumption because of uncertainties in conditional instructions on processors and time-varying external environments. Through studying the relationship between energy consumption, execution time and completion probability of tasks on heterogeneous multi-core architectures this paper proposes an optimal energy efficiency and system performance model and the OTHAP (Optimizing Task Heterogeneous Assignment with Probability) algorithm to address the Processor and Voltage Assignment with Probability (PVAP) problem of data-dependent aperiodic tasks in real-time embedded systems, ensuring that all the tasks can be done under the time constraint with a guaranteed probability. We adopt a task DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) to model the PVAP problem. We first use a processor scheduling algorithm to map the task DAG onto a set of voltage-variable processors, and then use our dynamic programming algorithm to assign a proper voltage to each task and The experimental results demonstrate our approach outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in this field (maximum improvement of 24.6%).