On Task Allocation and Scheduling for Lifetime Extension of Platform-Based MPSoC Designs

Abstract

Abstract-With the relentless scaling of semiconductor technology, the lifetime reliability of today's multiprocessor system-on-a-chip (MPSoC) designs has become one of the major concerns for the industry. Without explicitly taking this issue into consideration during the task allocation and scheduling process, existing works may lead to imbalanced aging rates among processors, thus reducing the system's service life. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose an analytical model to estimate the lifetime reliability of multiprocessor platforms when executing periodical tasks, and we present a novel task allocation and scheduling algorithm that is able to take the aging effects of processors into account, based on the simulated annealing technique. In addition, to speed up the annealing process, several techniques are proposed to simplify the design space exploration process with satisfactory solution quality. Experimental results on various hypothetical multiprocessors and task graphs show that significant system lifetime extension can be achieved by using the proposed approach, especially for heterogeneous platforms with large task graphs.Index Terms-Lifetime reliability, aging effect, multiprocessor system-on-a-chip, task allocation and scheduling.

Combined on-line lifetime-energy optimization for asymmetric multicores

“…The MTTF of the node is estimated by using a framework that exploits Monte Carlo simulations, random walks and the approach proposed in [11]; the MTTF of the entire system is estimated by using the first failure model, which offers a pessimistic estimation, since the system could still survive although with a lower QoS.…”

“…The obtained temperatures are processed and used to compute the cores' reliability according to Equations 1-3. We referred to [11] for choosing the values of the parameters related to EM, and to [16] for the ones related to TC.…”

“…However, if the adopted policies do not take into account how they affect the system lifetime, the architecture reliability might be significantly affected. On the other hand, those solutions that focus only on lifetime improvement ( [11,15,14,18,6]) are typically characterized by high energy consumption. This work proposes an approach for designing systems with combined on-line lifetime/energy optimization by exploiting the architecture asymmetry.…”

“…There are a few recent approaches aimed at resource management for either power consumption and/or lifetime optimization in symmetric [1,5,11,4,14,6] or asymmetric [10,21,18] architectures. The authors in [4] propose an off-line technique to improve the lifetime reliability of MPSoCs, while [11] describes a combination of design-time and runtime techniques to optimize it.…”

“…The authors in [4] propose an off-line technique to improve the lifetime reliability of MPSoCs, while [11] describes a combination of design-time and runtime techniques to optimize it. It is commonly agreed upon that online adaptation is essential when dealing with aging, temperature, or energy related optimization, due to the lack of significant information that could drive a design-time solution space exploration.…”