Energy minimization for reliability-guaranteed real-time applications using DVFS and checkpointing techniques

Abstract This paper addresses the energy minimization issue when executing real-time applications that have stringent reliability and deadline requirements. To guarantee the satisfaction of the application’s reliability and deadline requirements, checkpointing, Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS) and backward fault recovery techniques are used. We formally prove that if using backward fault recovery, executing an application with a uniform frequency or neighboring frequencies if the desired frequency is not available, not only consumes the minimal energy but also results in the highest system reliability. Based on this theoretical conclusion, we develop a strategy that utilizes DVFS and checkpointing techniques to execute real-time applications so that not only the applications reliability and deadline requirements are guaranteed, but also the energy consumption for executing the applications is minimized. The developed strategy needs at most one execution frequency change during the execution of an application, hence, the execution overhead caused by frequency switching is small, which makes the strategy particularly useful for processors with a large frequency switching overhead. We empirically compare the developed real-time application execution strategy with recently published work. The experimental results show that, without sacrificing reliability and deadline satisfaction guarantees, the proposed approach can save up to 12% more energy when compared with other approaches.