Energy-Efficient Scheduling of Primary/Backup Tasks in Multiprocessor Real-Time Systems (Extended Version)

With the negative effects of the popular Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) technique on transient faults being considered, the Primary/Backup approach has recently been exploited to save energy while preserving system reliability. In this paper, with the objectives of tolerating a single permanent fault and maintaining system reliability with respect to transient faults, we study energy-efficient dynamic-priority based scheduling algorithms for periodic Primary/Backup tasks on multiprocessor systems. Specifically, by separating primary and backup tasks on their dedicated processors, we first devise two schemes based on the idea of Standby-Sparing (SS): For Paired-SS, processors are organized as groups of two (i.e., pairs) and the existing SS scheme is applied within each pair of processors after partitioning tasks to the pairs. In Generalized-SS, processors are divided into two groups (of potentially different sizes), which are denoted as primary and secondary processor groups, respectively. The main (backup) tasks are scheduled on the primary (secondary) processor group under the partitioned-EDF (partitioned-EDL) with DVFS (DPM) to save energy. Next, instead of dedicating some processors to backup tasks, we propose schemes that allocate primary and backup tasks in a mixed manner to better utilize the slack time on all processors for more energy savings. On each processor, the Preference-Oriented Earliest Deadline (POED) scheduler is adopted to run primary tasks at scaled frequencies as soon as possible (ASAP) and backup tasks at the maximum frequency as late as possible (ALAP) to save energy. Online power management and recovery strategies are further discussed to address the problem with multiple permanent faults. Our empirical evaluations show that, for systems with a given number of processors, there normally exists an optimal configuration of primary and secondary groups for the Generalized-SS scheme, which leads to better energy savings compared to that of the Paired-SS scheme. Moreover, the POED-based schemes normally perform more stable and achieve better energy savings compared to those of the SS-based schemes.