Scheduler for parallel processing with finely grained tasks

A method of reducing overhead caused by the processor synchronization process and common memory accesses in finely grained tasks is described. We propose a scheduler which considers the preparation time during searching to minimize the redundant accesses to shared memory. Since the suggested hardware (synchronizer) determines the access order of processors and bus arbitration simultaneously by including the synchronization process into the bus arbitration process, the synchronization time vanishes. Therefore this synchronizer has no overhead caused by the processor synchronization[l]. The proposed scheduler algorithm is processed in parallel. The processes share the upper bound derived by each searching and the lower bound function is built considering the preparation time in order to eliminate as many searches as possible. An application of the proposed method to a multi-DSP system to calculate inverse dynamics for robot arms, showed that the sampling time can be twice shorter than that of the conventional one.