Response-Time Analysis of Synchronous Parallel Tasks in Multiprocessor Systems

Programmers resort to user-level parallel frameworks in order to exploit the parallelism provided by multiprocessor platforms. While such general frameworks do not support the stringent timing requirements of real-time systems, they offer a useful model of computation based on the standard fork/join, for which the analysis of timing properties makes sense. Very few works analyse the schedulability of synchronous parallel real-time tasks, which is a generalisation of the standard fork/join model. This paper proposes to narrow the gap by presenting a model that analyses the response-time of synchronous parallel real-time tasks. The model under consideration targets tasks with fixed priorities, composed of several segments with an arbitrary number of parallel and independent units of execution. We contribute to the state-of-the-art by analysing the response-time behaviour of synchronous parallel tasks. To accomplish this, we take into account concepts previously proposed in the literature and define new concepts such as carry-out decomposition and sliding window technique in order to compute the worst-case workload in a window of interest. Results show that the proposed approach is significantly better than current approaches, improving the state-of-the-art analysis of parallel real-time tasks