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Task mapping and priority assignment for soft real-time applications under deadline miss ratio constraints

Published:29 January 2008Publication History
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Abstract

Both analysis and design optimisation of real-time systems has predominantly concentrated on considering hard real-time constraints. For a large class of applications, however, this is both unrealistic and leads to unnecessarily expensive implementations. This paper addresses the problem of task priority assignment and task mapping in the context of multiprocessor applications with stochastic execution times and in the presence of constraints on the percentage of missed deadlines. We propose a design space exploration strategy together with a fast method for system performance analysis. Experiments emphasize the efficiency of the proposed analysis method and optimisation heuristic in generating high-quality implementations of soft real-time systems with stochastic task execution times and constraints on deadline miss ratios.

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          Michela Taufer

          Task mapping and priority assignment are critical to the efficiency of distributed multiprocessor systems. This paper presents a scheduling policy to perform these actions. The proposed method considers the stochastic rather than average character of the task execution times. The mapping problem is nondeterministic polynomial time (NP) hard. To keep the time to solution under control, a heuristic is used to map tasks and assign priority. The heuristic is based on the Tabu algorithm, and the search targets the minimization of a cost function including miss deviation. The proposed heuristic is evaluated for two case studies: a randomly generated benchmark, and a Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) voice decoding. The list of cited references consists of papers that are not recent. (Probably the reason for this is that in recent years the attention of the computer science (CS) community and the more recent publications on scheduling policies have moved from distributed to on-chip multiprocessor architectures.) My question for the authors is whether their approach can be applied to these architectures. Online Computing Reviews Service

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