Synopses & Reviews
Systematic Methodology for Real-Time Cost-Effective Mapping of Dynamic Concurrent Task-Based Systems on Heterogeneous Platforms gives an overview of the state-of-the-art in system-level design trade-off explorations for concurrent tasks running on embedded heterogeneous multiple processors. The targeted application domain covers complex embedded real-time multi-media and communication applications. Many of these applications are concurrent in the sense that multiple subsystems can be running simultaneously. Also, these applications are so dynamic at run-time that the designs based on the worst case execution times are inefficient in terms of resource allocation (e.g., energy budgets). A novel systematical approach is clearly necessary in the area of system-level design for the embedded systems where those concurrent and dynamic applications are mapped. This material is mainly based on research at IMEC and its international university network partners in this area in the period 1997-2006. In order to deal with the concurrent and dynamic behaviors in an energy-performance optimal way, we have adopted a hierarchical system model (i.e., the gray-box model) that can both exhibit the sufficient detail of the applications for design-time analysis and hide unnecessary detail for a low-overhead run-time management. We have also developed a well-balanced design-time/run-time combined task scheduling methodology to explore the trade-off space at design-time and efficiently handle the system adaptations at run-time. Moreover, we have identified the connection between task-level memory/communication management and task scheduling and illustrated how to perform the task-level memory/communication management in order to obtain the design constraints that enable the this connection. A fast approach is also shown to estimate at the system-level, the energy and performance characterization of applications executing on the target platform processors.
Synopsis
A genuinely useful text that gives an overview of the state-of-the-art in system-level design trade-off explorations for concurrent tasks running on embedded heterogeneous multiple processors. The targeted application domain covers complex embedded real-time multi-media and communication applications. This material is mainly based on research at IMEC and its international university network partners in this area over the last decade. In all, the material those in the digital signal processing industry will find here is bang up-to-date.
Synopsis
The main intention of this book is to give an impression of the state of the art in energy-aware task-scheduling-related issues for very dynamic emb- ded real-time processing applications. The material is based on research at IMEC in this area in the period 1999 2006, with a very extensive state-- the-art overview. It can be viewed as a follow-up of the earlier Modeling, veri?cation and exploration of task-level concurrency in real-time embedded systems book 234] that was published in 1999 based on the task-level m- eling work at IMEC. In order to deal with the stringent timing requirements, the cost-sensitivity and the dynamic characteristics of our target domain, we have again adopted a target architecture style (i. e., heterogeneous mul- processor) and a systematic methodology to make the exploration and op- mization of such systems feasible. But this time our focus is mainly on p- viding practical work ?ow out of the (abstract) general ?ow from previous book and also the relevant scheduling techniques for each step of this ?ow. Our approach is very heavily application-driven which is illustrated by several realistic demonstrators. Moreover, the book addresses only the steps above the traditional real-time operating systems (RTOS), which are mainly focused on correct solutions for dispatching tasks. Our methodology is nearly fully independent of the implementations in the RTOS so it is va- able for the realization on those existing embedded systems where legacy applications and underlying RTOS have been developed."
About the Author
Francky Catthoor is a leading researcher at IMEC and is very well established within the EDA community. He is IEEE Fellow and has edited and authored 6 books for Springer/Kluwer.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction. 1.1 The System-on-Chip Era. 1.2 Characteristics of Embedded Software. 1.3 Context and Motivation. 1.4 TCM Framework. 1.5 Overview of Chapters. Chapter 2: Related Work. 2.1 Real-time Scheduling. 2.2 Low-power Considerations. 2.3 Platform Issues and Co-design Framework. Chapter 3: System Model and Work flow. 3.1 Overview of TCM Work flow. 3.2 Gray-box Model. 3.3 System Scenario Selection. 3.4 Two-phase Scheduling. 3.5 Summary. Chapter 4: Basic Design-time Scheduling. 4.1 Problem Formulation. 4.2 Exact Scheduling Algorithms. 4.3 Forward Search Algorithm. 4.4 Backward Search Algorithm. 4.5 Sub-platform Scheduling. 4.6 Handling Timing-Constraints. 4.7 Summary. Chapter 5: Scalable Design-time Scheduling. 5.1 Introduction. 5.2 Motivational Example. 5.3 Thread Frame Decomposition. 5.4 Thread Partition Clustering. 5.5 Thread Partition Interleaving. 5.6 Experimental Results and Discussions. 5.7 Comparison with State of the Art. 5.8 Summary. Chapter 6: Fast and Scalable Run-time Scheduling. 6.1 Two-Phase Task Scheduling: Why and How. 6.2 Run-time Scheduling Algorithm. 6.3 Experimental Results. 6.4 Summary. Chapter 7: Handling of Multi-dimensional Pareto Curves. 7.1 Overview of The Customized Run-time Management. 7.2 Problem Formulation of Run-time Operating Point Selector. 7.3 Related Work. 7.4 MP-SoC Heuristic Description. 7.5 Experimental Results. 7.6 Summary. Chapter 8: Run-time Software Multithreading. 8.1 Motivation of Run-time Re-scheduling. 8.2 Run-time Interleaving. 8.3 Experimental Results and Discussion. 8.4 Comparison with State of the Art. 8.5 Summary. Chapter 9: Fast Source-level Performance Estimation. 9.1 Introduction. 9.2 Motivational Example. 9.3 Comparison With State of The Art. 9.4 Fundamentals of The Estimation Technique. 9.5 Experimental Results. 9.6 Summary. Chapter 10: Handling of Task-level Data Communication and Storage. 10.1 Memory Architecture. 10.2 Exploring Thread Node Level Data Reuse. 10.3 Data Assignment On L1 Memory Layer. 10.4 Bandwidth Aware Scheduling. 10.5 Handling inter-TN and inter-TF Data Transfers. 10.6 Summary. Chapter 11: Demonstration on Heterogeneous Multiprocessor SoCs. 11.1 Motivation for Heterogeneous Multiprocessor Platforms. 11.2 Mapping Visual Texture Coding Decoder. 11.3 Summary. Chapter 12: Conclusions and future research work. Input and output data of scheduling examples in Section 4.3.1. References.