A DVFS-Weakly Dependent Energy-Efficient Scheduling Approach for Deadline-Constrained Parallel Applications on Heterogeneous Systems

Heterogeneous computing systems are being increasingly deployed on time-critical applications, where tasks need to meet execution deadlines and the energy consumption is to be minimized. Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) has been widely applied for energy saving on computing devices. Unfortunately, DVFS may introduce transient errors and shorten the processor lifetime. There is also time and energy overhead when computing and making the switching. In this article, we investigate scheduling approaches—that are independent of, or weakly dependent on DVFS—for parallel real-time applications with hard deadlines running on heterogeneous computing systems. The aim is to minimise the energy consumption while keeping all deadlines satisfied. First, in the domain without DVFS, we propose a DVFS-nondependent scheduling algorithm (DNDS), which prioritises tasks of high energy consumption during reassignment with slack time. Second, we propose a DVFS-weakly dependent scheduling (DWDS) algorithm, which finds an appropriate frequency for each processor in an iterative manner. DVFS is only allowed when switching applications. Third, based on DWDS, we further propose an algorithm Fast_DWDS, which quickly converges by deploying a binary search method. Our proposed scheduling approaches are evaluated with a large number of directed acyclic graph-based applications of high, low, and random parallelism. The results show that they significantly reduce the energy cost compared to their existing counterparts, i.e., without and with DVFS, respectively, while all deadlines remain satisfied.