Coloring the caches for predictability on multicores
- Speaker
- Date and Time
Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 13.30
- Location
Polacksbaken, room 1146
- Abstract
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The major obstacle to use multicores for real-time applications is that we may not predict and provide any guarantee on real-time properties of embedded software on such platforms; the way of handling the on-chip shared resources such as L2 cache may have a significant impact on the timing predictability.
In this talk, we will try to motivate the technical challenges in this research area. As a potential solution, we propose to use cache space isolation techniques to avoid cache contention for hard realtime tasks running on multicores with shared caches. We present a scheduling strategy for real-time tasks with both timing and cache space constraints, which allows each task to use a fixed number of cache partitions, and makes sure that at any time a cache partition is occupied by at most one running task. In this way, the cache spaces of tasks are isolated at run-time, and the WCET of a task can be estimated using existing techniques for single processor systems, which can be used for system-level timing analysis.
As technical contributions, we have developed a sufficient schedulability test for non-preemptive fixed-priority scheduling for multicores with shared L2 cache, encoded as a linear programming problem. To evaluate the performance and scalability of our techniques, we use randomly generated task sets. Our experiments show that the test based on an LP-solver can easily handle task sets with thousands of tasks in minutes using a desktop computer.
We will also outline recent ideas for the multicore timing analysis when the bandwidth for memory access is involved.