Real-Time Process Synchronization for Systems with Accelerators

• Main Authors: Kuan-Chung Huang, 黃冠中
• Other Authors: 郭大維
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/70219023977099671952

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 資訊工程學研究所 === 101 === The potential speedup of applications has motivated the hybrid design of general purpose processors and dedicated accelerators in electronics industry, but such a design also leads to a serious synchronization problem when shared resources are considered. This paper explores the joint consideration of task synchronization and accelerator allocation for real-time systems, and the ob- jective is to minimize the worst-case total blocking time for accessing share resources and accelerators of each task so as to meet all real-time require- ments. For accelerator allocation, we develop an inheritance mechanism of accelerator privilege, which allows low-priority task to use an accelerator at the priority of the high-priority task when the high-priority task is blocked by the low-priority task. Co-working with the proposed accelerator alloca- tion mechanism, our synchronization protocol efficiently bounds the times of blocking to 2 for each real-time task. By looking into the currently used semaphores and the priorities of all tasks offloaded on accelerators, our pro- tocol is developed to prevent chained blocking among tasks, which could be caused by most of the existing synchronization protocols that are not aware of accelerators.