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Section: New Results

Power consumption of probabilistic real-time systems

Energy consumption on real-time systems is a crucial problem nowadays as these systems are becoming complex and are expected to deliver more and more functionalities. At the same time, while the processing demand increases, the vast majority of these systems are powered by batteries and are deployed in hazardous environments making their maintenance difficult and impractical. Existing works on energy consumption and real-time systems are often based on a technique called Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS). The principle of this technique is to reduce the frequency of the processor in order to lower its input voltage, con- sequently reducing the energy required to power the processor. Nevertheless, by reducing the frequency of the processor, programs tend to take more time to complete their execution. In the context of real-time systems, programs need to finish their execution before a given deadline. Therefore, the goal of DVFS techniques is to derive proper frequencies that minimize energy consumption and still ensure that all deadlines of all the programs will be respected. Works carried during this postdoc are twofold. The first contribution consisted in observing how the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) of programs varies with regards to the frequency of the processor. Many existing works have considered that the WCET is completely scalable, i.e., a simple factor can be applied to derive a new WCET under a different frequency setup. Nevertheless, researchers have recognize that this hypothesis may be too optimistic since other components, that do not run at the same speed as the processor, e.g., the memory, are used by programs. We derived an experimental setup to observe how the execution of programs varied by setting different frequencies on the processor and the memory. We measured CPU cycles and execution times and it was clear from our experiments that the theoretical speedup bound that should be achieved when the processor is running at its maximum speed is never achieved. We also observed, that DVFS techniques could also be applied to the memory of the system, since some programs do not perform many memory request. Our experiments led to a short paper accepted for the Work-in-Progress session of the 40th Real-Time System Symposium. The paper also introduced the task model that will be used as a basis of the next contribution of the postdoc. This next contribution consists in developing RTA techniques for probabilistic real-time systems in order to derive hardware frequency setups. The inclusion of probabilistic real-time system is motivated by the ever-increasing demand of functionalities for this type of systems. To the best of our knowledge, DVFS techniques in conjunction with probabilistic real-time systems have never been studied. The solution to this optimization problem is ongoing work while preparing the submission of first results beginning of February 2020.