Energy-Aware Scheduling Strategies for Partially-Replicable Task Chains on Heterogeneous Processors

Abstract

The arrival of heterogeneous (or hybrid) multicore architectures has brought new performance trade-offs for applications, and efficiency opportunities to systems. They have also increased the challenges related to thread scheduling, as tasks' execution times will vary depending if they are placed on big (performance) cores or little (efficient) ones. In this paper, we focus on the challenges heterogeneous multicore processors bring to partially-replicable task chains, such as the ones that implement digital communication standards in Software-Defined Radio (SDR). Our objective is to maximize the throughput of these task chains while also minimizing their power consumption. We model this problem as a pipelined workflow scheduling problem using pipelined and replicated parallelism on two types of resources whose objectives are to minimize the period and to use as many little cores as necessary. We propose two greedy heuristics (FERTAC and 2CATAC) and one optimal dynamic programming (HeRAD) solution to the problem. We study an open source implementation of the DVB-S2 communication standard based on the StreamPU runtime. Leading processor vendors are covered with ARM, Apple, AMD, and Intel platforms. Both the achieved throughput and the energy consumption are evaluated. Our results demonstrate the benefits and drawbacks of the different proposed solutions. On average, FERTAC and 2CATAC achieve near-optimal solutions, with periods that are less than 10% worse than the optimal (HeRAD). These three scheduling strategies now enable programmers and users of StreamPU to transparently make use of heterogeneous multicore processors and achieve a throughput that differs from its theoretical maximum by less than 6% on average. On the DVB-S2 receiver, it is also shown that the heterogeneous solutions outperform the best homogeneous ones in terms of energy efficiency by 8% on average.