CSR: Medium: Collaborative Research: Providing Predictable Timing for Task Migration in Embedded Multi-Core Environments (TiME-ME)

Assuring deadlines of embedded tasks for contemporary multicore architectures is becoming increasingly difficult. Real-time scheduling relies on task migration to exploit multicores, yet migration actually reduces timing predictability due to cache warm-up overheads and increased interconnect traffic.

We promote a fundamentally new approach to increase the timing predictability of multicore architectures aimed at task migration in embedded environments making three major contributions.
1. We develop novel strategies to guide migration based on cost/benefit tradeoffs exploiting both static and dynamic analyses.
2. We devise mechanisms to increase timing predictability under task migration providing explicit support for proactive and reactive real-time data movement across cores and their caches.
3. We promote rate- and bandwidth-adaptive mechanisms as well as monitoring capabilities to increase predictability under task migration.

Our work aims at initiating a novel research direction investigating the benefits of interactions between hardware and software for embedded multicores with respect to timing predictability. This project fundamentally contributes to the research and educational infrastructure for the design and development of safety- and mission-critical embedded systems.

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"This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0905181."

"Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation."