Run-Time Enforcement of Non-Functional Application Requirements in Heterogeneous Many-Core Systems

For many embedded applications, non-functional requirements such as safety, reliability, and execution time must be guaranteed in tight bounds on a given multi-core platform. Here, jitter in non-functional program execution qualities is caused either by outer influences such as faults injected by the environment, but can be induced also from the system management software itself, including thread-to-core mapping, scheduling and power management. A second huge source of variability typically stems from data-dependent workloads. In this paper, we classify and present techniques to enforce nonfunctional execution properties on multi-core platforms. Based on a static design space exploration and analysis of influences of variability of non-functional properties, enforcement strategies are generated to guide the execution of periodically executed applications in given requirement corridors. Using the case study of a complex image streaming application, we show that by controlling DVFS settings of cores proactively, not only tight execution times, but also reliability requirements may be enforced dynamically while trying to minimize energy consumption.