Heterogeneous multi-cores utilize the strength of different architectures for executing particular types of workload, and usually offer higher performance and energy efficiency. In this paper, we study the worst-case response time (WCRT) analysis of scheduling of parallel DAG tasks on heterogeneous multi-cores, where the workload of each vertex in the DAG is only allowed to execute on a particular type of cores. The only known WCRT bound for this problem is grossly pessimistic and suffers the problem. In this paper, we propose two new WCRT bounds. The first new bound has the same time complexity as the existing bound, but is more precise and solves its problem. The second new bound explores more detailed task graph structure information to greatly improve the precision, but is computationally more expensive. We prove that the problem of computing the second bound is strongly NP-hard if the number of types in the system is a variable, and develop an efficient algorithm which has polynomial time complexity if the number of types is a constant. Experiments with randomly generated workload show that our proposed new methods are significantly more precise than the existing bound while having good scalability.
This paper considers for the first time end-to-end response-time analysis for DAG-based real-time task systems implemented on heterogeneous multicore platforms. The specific analysis problem that is considered was motivated by an industrial collaboration involving wireless cellular base stations. The DAG-based systems considered herein allow intra-task parallelism: while each invocation of a task (i.e., DAG node) is sequential, successive invocations of a task may execute in parallel. In the proposed analysis, this characteristic is exploited to reduce response-time bounds. Additionally, there is some leeway in choosing how to set tasks' relative deadlines. It is shown that by resolving such choices holistically via linear programming, response-time bounds can be further reduced. Finally, in the considered use case, DAGs are defined based upon just a few templates and individually often have quite low utilizations. It is shown that, by combining many such DAGs into one of higher utilization, response-time bounds can often be drastically lowered. The effectiveness of these techniques is demonstrated via both case-study and schedulability experiments.