• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.18 no.7
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• pp.1704-1712
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• 2014

The unused Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) allocated to a real-time task occurs when the actual execution time of the task can be far less than the WCET preassigned to the task for a schedulability test. Any unused WCET allocated to the task can be exploited to reduce the power consumption of battery-powered sensor nodes through real-time power-aware scheduling techniques. From the distribution perspective of the unused WCET, the unused WCET distribution policy is classified into three types: Conservative Unused WCET (CU-WCET), Moderate Unused WCET (MU-WCET), and Aggressive Unused WCET (AU-WCET) distribution policies. We evaluated the performance of real-time power-aware scheduling techniques incorporating each of three unused WCET distribution policies in terms of low power consumption.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.12-25
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• 2012

For real-time systems it is important to obtain the accurate worst-case execution time (WCET). Furthermore, how to improve the WCET of applications that run on multicore processors is both significant and challenging as the WCET can be largely affected by the possible inter-core interferences in shared resources such as the shared L2 cache. In order to solve this problem, we propose an innovative approach that adopts a code positioning method to reduce the inter-core L2 cache interferences between the different real-time threads that adaptively run in a multi-core processor by using different strategies. The worst-case-oriented strategy is designed to decrease the worst-case WCET among these threads to as low as possible. The other two strategies aim at reducing the WCET of each thread to almost equal percentage or amount. Our experiments indicate that the proposed multicore-aware code positioning approaches, not only improve the worst-case performance of the real-time threads but also make good tradeoffs between efficiency and fairness for threads that run on multicore platforms.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.12A no.5 s.95
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• pp.365-374
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• 2005

Schedulability analysis is necessary to build reliable embedded real-time systems. For schedulability analysis, worst-case execution time(WCET) analysis that computes upper bounds of the execution times of tasks, is required indispensably. WCET analysis is done in two phases. The first phase is high-level analysis that analyzes control flow and finds longest paths of the program. The second phase is low-level analysis that computes execution cycles of basic blocks taking into account the hardware architecture. In this thesis, we design and implement integrated WCET analysis tools. We develop the WCET analysis tools for XScale-based system called WATER(WCET Analysis Tool for Embedded Real-time system). WATER consist of high-level flow analyzer and low-level execution time analyzer. Also, We compare real measurement for execution of program with analysis result calculated by WATER.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.131-140
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• 2011

Different cores typically share the last-level cache in a multi-core processor. Threads running on different cores may interfere with each other. Therefore, the multi-core worst-case execution time (WCET) analyzer must be able to safely and accurately estimate the worst-case inter-thread cache interference. This is not supported by current WCET analysis techniques that manly focus on single thread analysis. This paper presents a novel approach to analyze the worst-case cache interference and bounding the WCET for threads running on multi-core processors with shared L2 instruction caches. We propose to use an interference matrix to model inter-thread interference, on which basis we can calculate the worst-case inter-thread cache interference. Our experiments indicate that the proposed approach can give a worst-case bound less than 1%, as in benchmark fib-call, and an average 16.4% overestimate for threads running on a dual-core processor with shared-L2 cache. Our approach dramatically improves the accuracy of WCET overestimatation by on average 20.0% compared to work.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2003.10b
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• pp.367-369
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• 2003

인공위성 탑재 소프트웨어는 정해진 시간 내에 필요한 작업을 수행하여야 하는 실시간 내장형 소프트웨어로 타이밍 분석이 중요하다. 기존의 인공위성소프트웨어 개발 시 적용되는 타이밍 분석기법은 개발자의 수작업에 의존하여 많은 시간과 노력이 요구되며 정확성에 문제가 있을 수 있는 단점이 있었다. 본 논문에서는 위성소프트에어의 타이밍 분석에 적용 가능한 최장 실행시간 (Worst Case Execution Time, WCET) 기법을 조사하고 보다 정확한 (tight) WCET를 구하기 위해 입력 데이터를 고려한 WCET 분석 방안을 제안한다.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.177-189
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• 2015

High-performance processors using Non-Uniform Cache Architecture (NUCA) are increasingly used to deal with the growing wire delays in multicore/manycore processors. Due to the convergence of high-performance computing with embedded computing, NUCA caches are expected to benefit high-end embedded systems as well. However, for real-time systems that use multicore processors with NUCA caches, it is crucial to bound worst-case execution time (WCET) accurately and safely. In this paper, we developed a WCET analysis approach by considering the effect of static NUCA caches on WCET. We compared the WCET in real-time applications with different topologies of static NUCA caches. Our experimental results demonstrated that the static NUCA cache could improve the worst-case performance of realtime applications using multicore processor compared to the cache with uniform access time.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.285-299
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• 2013

To enable hard real-time systems to take advantage of multicore processors, it is crucial to obtain the worst-case execution time (WCET) for programs running on multicore processors. However, this is challenging and complicated due to the inter-thread interferences from the shared resources in a multicore processor. Recent research used the combined cache conflict graph (CCCG) to model and compute the worst-case inter-thread interferences on a shared L2 cache in a multicore processor, which is called the CCCG-based approach in this paper. Although it can compute the WCET safely and accurately, its computational complexity is exponential and prohibitive for a large number of cores. In this paper, we propose three counter-based approaches to significantly reduce the complexity of the multicore WCET analysis, while achieving absolute safety with tightness close to the CCCG-based approach. The basic counter-based approach simply counts the worst-case number of cache line blocks mapped to a cache set of a shared L2 cache from all the concurrent threads, and compares it with the associativity of the cache set to compute the worst-case cache behavior. The enhanced counter-based approach uses techniques to enhance the accuracy of calculating the counters. The hybrid counter-based approach combines the enhanced counter-based approach and the CCCG-based approach to further improve the tightness of analysis without significantly increasing the complexity. Our experiments on a 4-core processor indicate that the enhanced counter-based approach overestimates the WCET by 14% on average compared to the CCCG-based approach, while its averaged running time is less than 1/380 that of the CCCG-based approach. The hybrid approach reduces the overestimation to only 2.65%, while its running time is less than 1/150 that of the CCCG-based approach on average.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.53-66
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• 2013

Bounding the worst-case DRAM performance for a real-time application is a challenging problem that is critical for computing worst-case execution time (WCET), especially for multicore processors, where the DRAM memory is usually shared by all of the cores. Typically, DRAM commands from consecutive DRAM accesses can be pipelined on DRAM devices according to the spatial locality of the data fetched by them. By considering the effect of DRAM command pipelining, we propose a basic approach to bounding the worst-case DRAM performance. An enhanced approach is proposed to reduce the overestimation from the invalid DRAM access sequences by checking the timing order of the co-running applications on a dual-core processor. Compared with the conservative approach, which assumes that no DRAM command pipelining exists, our experimental results show that the basic approach can bound the WCET more tightly, by 15.73% on average. The experimental results also indicate that the enhanced approach can further improve the tightness of WCET by 4.23% on average as compared to the basic approach.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.67-80
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• 2013

The worst-case execution time (WCET) of each real-time task in multicore processors with shared caches can be significantly affected by inter-thread cache interferences. The worst-case inter-thread cache interferences are dependent on how tasks are scheduled to run on different cores. Therefore, there is a circular dependence between real-time task scheduling, the worst-case inter-thread cache interferences, and WCET in multicore processors, which is not the case for single-core processors. To address this challenging problem, we present an offline real-time scheduling approach for multicore processors by considering the worst-case inter-thread interferences on shared L2 caches. Our scheduling approach uses a greedy heuristic to generate safe schedules while minimizing the worst-case inter-thread shared L2 cache interferences and WCET. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can reduce the utilization of the resulting schedule by about 12% on average compared to the cyclic multicore scheduling approaches in our theoretical model. Our evaluation indicates that the enhanced scheduling approach is more likely to generate feasible and safe schedules with stricter timing constraints in multicore real-time systems.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.176-184
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• 2002

We provide a checkpointing framework reflecting both the timeliness and the dependability in order to make checkpointing applicable to dependable real-time systems. The predictability of real-time tasks with checkpointing is guaranteed by the worst case execution time (WCET) based on the allocated number of checkpoints and the permissible number of failures. The permissible number of failures is derived from fault tolerance requirements, thus guaranteeing the dependability of tasks. Using the WCET and the permissible number of failures of tasks, we develop an algorithm that determines the minimum number of checkpoints allocated to each task in order to guarantee the schedulability of a task set. Since the framework is based on the amount of time redundancy caused by checkpointing, it can be extended to other time redundancy techniques.