Improving lifetime of multicore soft real-time systems through global utilization control

Abstract

System lifetime reliability is an important design consideration for many real-time embedded systems. Increasing integrated circuit power density and the subsequent rise in chip temperature negatively impact the lifetime reliability of such systems. Although existing thermal-aware methods are effective in reducing temperature, they may not increase, and may even hamper, the system lifetime reliability. The complicated relationship between temperature and system lifetime requires that reliability be considered explicitly during system design. This paper presents a reliability-aware utilization control framework for homogeneous multicore soft real-time systems. The framework employs a model predictive controller to increase the system lifetime by manipulating the processor utilization. An online heuristic algorithm is introduced to adjust the controller's sampling window in order to reduce the effects of thermal cycling on reliability. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can improve the system mean time to failure by at least 43% and as much as 369% compared to existing techniques.