Hyeran Jeon, Woo Hyong Lee, and Sung Woo Chung, "Load Unbalancing Strategy for Multicore Embedded Processors", IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 59, no. 10, pp. 1434-1440, October 2010.
Abstract
Load balancing has been known as an essential feature for enhancing the
performance of distributed systems. For embedded systems, however, this
is not always true since load balancing leads to lavish power
consumption by fully utilizing all the embedded cores even for a small
number of tasks. Furthermore, the previously proposed load unbalancing
strategies do not concern much about the characteristics of the embedded
system's real workload. In this paper, to resolve this problem, we
propose a novel load unbalancing strategy based on the task
characteristics: periodic and aperiodic. In the proposed strategy, the
periodic tasks that are more likely to be executed repeatedly are
concentrated on the minimum number of cores, whereas the aperiodic tasks
that are not likely to occur again soon are distributed to the maximum
number of cores. The experimental results on an ARM11MPCore test chip
show that the proposed strategy reduces power consumption and mean
waiting time of the aperiodic tasks by up to 26 percent and 82 percent,
respectively, compared to the load balancing strategy. As compared to
the aggressive load unbalancing strategy, the proposed strategy also
reduces mean waiting time of the aperiodic tasks by 92 percent with
similar power efficiency.