On the Design of Real-Time Systems on Multi- Core Platforms under Uncertainty

OF THE DISSERTATION ON THE DESIGN OF REAL-TIME SYSTEMS ON MULTI-CORE PLATFORMS UNDER UNCERTAINTY by Tianyi Wang Florida International University, 2015 Miami, Florida Professor Gang Quan, Major Professor Real-time systems are computing systems that demand the assurance of not only the logical correctness of computational results but also the timing of these results. To ensure timing constraints, traditional real-time system designs usually adopt a worst-case based deterministic approach. However, such an approach is becoming out of sync with the continuous evolution of IC technology and increased complexity of real-time applications. As IC technology continues to evolve into the deep submicron domain, process variation causes processor performance to vary from die to die, chip to chip, and even core to core. The extensive resource sharing on multicore platforms also significantly increases the uncertainty when executing real-time tasks. The traditional approach can only lead to extremely pessimistic, and thus, unpractical design of real-time systems. Our research seeks to address the uncertainty problem when designing real-time systems on multi-core platforms. We first attacked the uncertainty problem caused by process variation. We proposed a virtualization framework and developed techniques to optimize the system’s performance under process variation. We further studied the problem on peak temperature minimization for real-time applications on multi-core platforms. Three heuristics were developed to reduce the peak temperature for real-time systems. Next, we sought to address the uncertainty problem