Energy-Aware Standby-Sparing on Heterogeneous Multicore Systems

Abstract

Standby-sparing systems where one processor is used as primary while another one is deployed as spare have been used to provide high reliability to real-time embedded systems. To reduce the energy consumption, the primary uses DVFS while the spare employs DPM to postpone the backup tasks. In this paper, we re-visit the problem for heterogeneous multicore systems that include both high-performance and low-power cores. We identify and address the two main dimensions of the problem, namely, what type of core to use as the primary or backup, and how to make frequency assignments on the primary to maximize energy savings.