Enhancing Task Assignment in Many-Core Systems by a Situation Aware Scheduler

The resource demand on embedded devices is constantly growing. This is caused by the sheer explosion of software based functions in embedded systems, that are growing far faster than the resources of the single-core and multi-core embedded processors. As one of the limitation is the computing power of the processors we need to explore ways to use this resource more efficiently. We identified that during the run-time of the embedded devices the resource demand of the software functions is permanently changing dependent on the device situation. To enable an embedded device to take advantage of this dynamic resource demand, the allocation of the software functions to the processor must be handled by a scheduler that is able to evaluate the resource demand of the software functions in relation to the device situation. This marks a change in embedded devices from static defined software systems to dynamic software systems. Above that we can increase the efficiency even further by extending the approach from a single device to a distributed or networked system (many-core system). However, existing approaches to deal with dynamic resource allocation are focused on individual devices and leave the optimization potential of manycore systems untouched. Our concept will extend the existing Hierarchical Asynchronous Multi-Core Scheduler (HAMS) concept for individual devices to many-core systems. This extension introduces a dynamic situation aware scheduler for many-core systems which take the current workload of all devices and the system-situation into account. With our approach, the resource efficiency of an embedded many-core system can be increased. The following paper will explain the architecture and the expected results of our concept