Architecture and Real-Time Systems (ARTS) Laboratory

Power-Aware Scheduling

This research is aimed towards performance-power tradeoffs for real-time systems. Power constraints are becoming increasingly important as we have more complicated semiconductor devices, sophisticated mobile and space related applications. Scheduling has long been recognised as perhaps being the most important system management concept. We aim to develop innovative scheduling algorithms to achieve our power performance tradeoffs. The technology we target are processors that can operate at a finite number of discrete voltage levels.

There are currently three specific scheduling problems that are under investigation.

• Minimizing energy for Hard Real-Time Periodic Task Graphs with Precedence Constraints.
• Maximizing the accumulated reward for a set of Hard Real-Time IRIS tasks within a given energy budget.
• Scheduling schemes for meeting Real-Time requirements of Soft Aperiodic tasks under a given energy budget and a given period for that budget.

To investigate these scheduling problems a in house simulator is currently under development. A collection of test inputs are also being put together to create a consistent database for evaluating these and similar scheduling schemes.