Worst-case energy consumption minimization based on interference analysis and bank mapping in multicore systems

Abstract

Energy is a scarce resource in real-time embedded systems due to the fact that most of them run on batteries. Hence, the designers should ensure that the energy constraints are satisfied in addition to the deadline constraints. This necessitates the consideration of the impact of the interference due to shared, low-level hardware resources such as the cache on the worst-case energy consumption of the tasks. Toward this aim, this article proposes a fine-grained approach to analyze the bank-level interference (bank conflict and bus access interference) on real-time multicore systems, which can reasonably estimate runtime interferences in shared cache and yield tighter worst-case energy consumption. In addition, we develop a bank-to-core mapping algorithm for reducing bank-level interference and improving the worst-case energy consumption. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach can improve the tightness of worst-case energy consumption by 14.25% on average compared to upper-bound delay approach. The bank-to-core mapping provides significant benefits in worst-case energy consumption reduction with 7.23%.