Reliability driven task scheduling for heterogeneous systems

In recent years, more and more heterogeneous processor cores are embedded into a single chip. To deploy such heterogeneous embedded systems in critical applications, e.g., aircraft control, battleship missile launches, nuclear plant safe operations, etc., an important research problem is how to maximize system reliability while satisfying the required time constraint. Therefore, a scheduling scheme is needed to exploit the heterogeneity of a system and satisfy both the reliability requirement and the given time constraint. In this paper, we study the heterogeneous reliability scheduling problem, i.e., given a heterogeneous system, a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) that models an application and a time constraint, find a schedule for the DAG so that the system reliability can be maximized and the time constraint can be met. To solve this problem, two heuristic algorithms, MCMS and PRMS, are proposed. The experimental results show that our algorithms can improve system reliability significantly. Among them, PRMS has the best performance and the improvement of reliability can be up to 30%.