We consider the problem of fair resource allocation in a system containing different resource types, where each user may have different demands for each resource. To address this problem, we propose Dominant Resource Fairness (DRF), a generalization of max-min fairness to multiple resource types. We show that DRF, unlike other possible policies, satisfies several highly desirable properties. First, DRF incentivizes users to share resources, by ensuring that no user is better off if resources are equally partitioned among them. Second, DRF is strategy-proof, as a user cannot increase her allocation by lying about her requirements. Third, DRF is envy-free, as no user would want to trade her allocation with that of another user. Finally, DRF allocations are Pareto efficient, as it is not possible to improve the allocation of a user without decreasing the allocation of another user. We have implemented DRF in the Mesos cluster resource manager, and show that it leads to better throughput and fairness than the slot-based fair sharing schemes in current cluster schedulers.

https://static.usenix.org/event/nsdi11/tech/full_papers/Ghodsi.pdf

Dominant resource fairness: fair allocation of multiple resource types

One of the most significant advances in the development of computer science, information and communication technologies is represented by the cyber-physical systems (CPS). They are systems of collaborating computational entities which are in intensive connection with the surrounding physical world and its on-going processes, providing and using, at the same time, data-accessing and data-processing services available on the Internet. Cyber-physical production systems (CPPS), relying on the latest, and the foreseeable further developments of computer science, information and communication technologies on one hand, and of manufacturing science and technology, on the other, may lead to the 4th industrial revolution, frequently noted as Industrie 4.0. The paper underlines that there are significant roots in general – and in particular to the CIRP community – which point towards CPPS. Expectations towards research in and implementation of CPS and CPPS are outlined and some case studies are introduced. Related new R&D challenges are highlighted.

Cyber-physical systems in manufacturing

This survey covers hard real-time scheduling algorithms and schedulability analysis techniques for homogeneous multiprocessor systems. It reviews the key results in this field from its origins in the late 1960s to the latest research published in late 2009. The survey outlines fundamental results about multiprocessor real-time scheduling that hold independent of the scheduling algorithms employed. It provides a taxonomy of the different scheduling methods, and considers the various performance metrics that can be used for comparison purposes. A detailed review is provided covering partitioned, global, and hybrid scheduling algorithms, approaches to resource sharing, and the latest results from empirical investigations. The survey identifies open issues, key research challenges, and likely productive research directions.

/pdf/a-survey-of-hard-real-time-scheduling-for-multiprocessor-313o35g6ho.pdf

A survey of hard real-time scheduling for multiprocessor systems

Data centers are critical, energy-hungry infrastructures that run large-scale Internet-based services. Energy consumption models are pivotal in designing and optimizing energy-efficient operations to curb excessive energy consumption in data centers. In this paper, we survey the state-of-the-art techniques used for energy consumption modeling and prediction for data centers and their components. We conduct an in-depth study of the existing literature on data center power modeling, covering more than 200 models. We organize these models in a hierarchical structure with two main branches focusing on hardware-centric and software-centric power models. Under hardware-centric approaches we start from the digital circuit level and move on to describe higher-level energy consumption models at the hardware component level, server level, data center level, and finally systems of systems level. Under the software-centric approaches we investigate power models developed for operating systems, virtual machines and software applications. This systematic approach allows us to identify multiple issues prevalent in power modeling of different levels of data center systems, including: i) few modeling efforts targeted at power consumption of the entire data center ii) many state-of-the-art power models are based on a few CPU or server metrics, and iii) the effectiveness and accuracy of these power models remain open questions. Based on these observations, we conclude the survey by describing key challenges for future research on constructing effective and accurate data center power models.

Data Center Energy Consumption Modeling: A Survey

To alleviate the complex communication problems that arise as the number of on-chip components increases, network-on-chip (NoC) architectures have been recently proposed to replace global interconnects. In this paper, we first provide a general description of NoC architectures and applications. Then, we enumerate several related research problems organized under five main categories: Application characterization, communication paradigm, communication infrastructure, analysis, and solution evaluation. Motivation, problem description, proposed approaches, and open issues are discussed for each problem from system, microarchitecture, and circuit perspectives. Finally, we address the interactions among these research problems and put the NoC design process into perspective.

Outstanding Research Problems in NoC Design: System, Microarchitecture, and Circuit Perspectives

The high power consumption of modern processors becomes a major concern because it leads to decreased mission duration (for battery-operated systems), increased heat dissipation, and decreased reliability. While many techniques have been proposed to reduce power consumption for uniprocessor systems, there has been considerably less work on multiprocessor systems. In this paper, based on the concept of slack sharing among processors, we propose two novel power-aware scheduling algorithms for task sets with and without precedence constraints executing on multiprocessor systems. These scheduling techniques reclaim the time unused by a task to reduce the execution speed of future tasks and, thus, reduce the total energy consumption of the system. We also study the effect of discrete voltage/speed levels on the energy savings for multiprocessor systems and propose a new scheme of slack reservation to incorporate voltage/speed adjustment overhead in the scheduling algorithms. Simulation and trace-based results indicate that our algorithms achieve substantial energy savings on systems with variable voltage processors. Moreover, processors with a few discrete voltage/speed levels obtain nearly the same energy savings as processors with continuous voltage/speed, and the effect of voltage/speed adjustment overhead on the energy savings is relatively small.

/pdf/scheduling-with-dynamic-voltage-speed-adjustment-using-slack-2hqher0uk5.pdf

Scheduling with dynamic voltage/speed adjustment using slack reclamation in multiprocessor real-time systems

The slack time in real-time systems can be used by recovery schemes to increase system reliability as well as by frequency and voltage scaling techniques to save energy. Moreover, the rate of transient faults (i.e., soft errors caused, for example, by cosmic ray radiations) also depends on system operating frequency and supply voltage. Thus, there is an interesting trade-off between system reliability and energy consumption. This work first investigates the effects of frequency and voltage scaling on the fault rate and proposes two fault rate models based on previously published data. Then, the effects of energy management on reliability are studied. Our analysis results show that, energy management through frequency and voltage scaling could dramatically reduce system reliability, and ignoring the effects of energy management on the fault rate is too optimistic and may lead to unsatisfied system reliability.

/pdf/the-effects-of-energy-management-on-reliability-in-real-time-35ac1y5zvq.pdf

The effects of energy management on reliability in real-time embedded systems

Power management has become popular in mobile computing as well as in server farms. Although a lot of work has been done to manage the energy consumption on uniprocessor real-time systems, there is less work done on their multicomputer counterparts. For a set of real-time tasks with precedence constraints executing on a distributed system, we propose new static and dynamic power management schemes. Assuming a given static schedule generated from any list scheduling heuristic algorithm, our static power management scheme uses the static slack (if any) based on the degree of parallelism in the schedule. To consider the run-time behavior of tasks, an on-line dynamic power management technique is proposed to further explore the idle periods of processors. By comparing our static technique with the simple static power management, where the static slack is distributed to the schedule proportionally, we find that our static scheme can save an average of 10% more energy. When combined with dynamic schemes, our schemes significantly improve energy savings.

/pdf/energy-aware-scheduling-for-distributed-real-time-systems-8tx3yl7wj4.pdf

Energy aware scheduling for distributed real-time systems

Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) has been widely used to manage energy in real-time embedded systems. However, it was recently shown that DVFS has direct and adverse effects on system reliability. In this work, we investigate static and dynamic reliability-aware energy management schemes to minimize energy consumption for periodic real-time systems while preserving system reliability. Focusing on earliest deadline first (EDF) scheduling, we first show that the static version of the problem is NP-hard and propose two task-level utilization-based heuristics. Then, we develop a job-level online scheme by building on the idea of wrapper-tasks, to monitor and manage dynamic slack efficiently in reliability-aware settings. The feasibility of the dynamic scheme is formally proved. Finally, we present two integrated approaches to reclaim both static and dynamic slack at runtime. To preserve system reliability, the proposed schemes incorporate recovery tasks/jobs into the schedule as needed, while still using the remaining slack for energy savings. The proposed schemes are evaluated through extensive simulations. The results confirm that all the proposed schemes can preserve the system reliability, while the ordinary (but reliability-ignorant) energy management schemes result in drastically decreased system reliability. For the static heuristics, the energy savings are close to what can be achieved by an optimal solution by a margin of 5 percent. By effectively exploiting the runtime slack, the dynamic schemes can achieve additional energy savings while preserving system reliability.

/pdf/reliability-aware-energy-management-for-periodic-real-time-2icopfyzod.pdf

Reliability-Aware Energy Management for Periodic Real-Time Tasks

The power consumption of modern high-performance processors is becoming a major concern because it leads to increased heat dissipation and decreased reliability. While many techniques have been proposed to reduce power consumption for uni-processors, there has been considerably less work on multi-processor systems. In this paper we focus on power-aware scheduling for multi-processor real-time systems. Based on the idea of slack sharing among processors, we propose two novel scheduling algorithms for task sets with and without precedence constraints. These scheduling techniques reclaim the time unused by a task to reduce the execution speed of future tasks, and thus reduce the total energy consumption of the system. Simulation results indicate that our algorithms achieve up to 60% energy savings on multi-processor systems with variable voltage processors.

Dakai Zhu

Papers

Scheduling with dynamic voltage/speed adjustment using slack reclamation in multiprocessor real-time systems

The effects of energy management on reliability in real-time embedded systems

Energy aware scheduling for distributed real-time systems

Reliability-Aware Energy Management for Periodic Real-Time Tasks

Scheduling with dynamic voltage/speed adjustment using slack reclamation in multi-processor real-time systems