10th IEEE International Symposium on Object and Component-Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing (ISORC'07)
An Efficient Algorithm for Online Soft Real-Time Task Placement on Reconfigurable Hardware Devices
Santorini Island, Greece
May 07-May 09
ISBN: 0-7695-2765-5
Jin Cui, Northeastern University, China
Zonghua Gu, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China
Weichen Liu, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China
Reconfigurable devices such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are very popular in today?s embedded systems design due to their low-cost, high-performance and flexibility. Partially Runtime-Reconfigurable (PRTR) FPGAs allow hardware tasks to be placed and removed dynamically at runtime. Hardware task scheduling on PRTR FPGAs brings many challenging issues to traditional real-time scheduling theory, which have not been adequately addressed by the real-time research community compared to software task scheduling on CPUs. In this paper, we present an efficient online task placement algorithm for minimizing fragmentation on PRTR FPGAs. First, we present a novel 2D area fragmentation metric that takes into account probability distribution of sizes of future task arrivals; second, we take into the time axis to obtain a 3D fragmentation metric. Simulation experiments indicate that our techniques result in low ratio of task rejection and high FPGA utilization compared to existing techniques.
Citation:
Jin Cui, Zonghua Gu, Weichen Liu, Qingxu Deng, "An Efficient Algorithm for Online Soft Real-Time Task Placement on Reconfigurable Hardware Devices," isorc, pp.321-328, 10th IEEE International Symposium on Object and Component-Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing (ISORC'07), 2007