Locality-conscious process scheduling in embedded systems

• Published in: International Conference on Hardware Software Codesign: Proceedings of the tenth international symposium on Hardware/software codesign; 06-08 May 2002 pp. 193 - 198
• Main Authors: Kadayif, I., Kandemir, M., Kolcu, I., Chen, G.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 06.05.2002; IEEE
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Application software; Computer systems organization > Embedded and cyber-physical systems; Computer systems organization > Real-time systems; Embedded software; Embedded system; Hardware; Operating systems; Optimizing compilers; Processor scheduling; Runtime; Software and its engineering > Software notations and tools > Compilers; Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Contextual software domains > Operating systems > Process management > Scheduling; Software architecture; Switches
• ISBN: 1581135424; 9781581135428
• DOI: 10.1145/774789.774829

In many embedded systems, existence of a data cache might influence the effectiveness of process scheduling policy significantly. Consequently, a scheduling policy that takes inter-process data reuse into account might result in large performance benefits. In this paper, we focus on array-intensive embedded applications and present a locality-conscious scheduling strategy where we first evaluate the potential data reuse between processes, and then, using the results of this evaluation, select an order for process executions. We also show how process codes can be transformed by an optimizing compiler for increasing inter-process data reuse, thereby making locality-conscious scheduling more effective. Our experimental results obtained using two large, multi-process application codes indicate significant runtime benefits.