Trading Cores For Memory Bandwidth In Real-Time Systems

Federated scheduling has been proposed for parallel tasks. In this scheduling scheme, each parallel task is a assigned a private set of cores whereas sequential tasks share the remaining set of cores. Since parallel tasks are assigned dedicated cores, they receive no interference from other tasks. However, multicore processors are commonly built with shared main memory. The memory bandwidth is limited and therefore subject to contention. Consequently, parallel tasks can interfere with each other through the shared main memory. In this paper, we propose a novel method that is memory-aware when assigning cores to tasks. Our experimental results show a significant advantage of our method with respect to memory-oblivious methods.