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 great amounts of energy consumed by large-scale computing and network systems, such as data centers and supercomputers, have been a major source of concern in a society increasingly reliant on information technology. Trying to tackle this issue, the research community and industry have proposed myriad techniques to curb the energy consumed by IT systems. This article surveys techniques and solutions that aim to improve the energy efficiency of computing and network resources. It discusses methods to evaluate and model the energy consumed by these resources, and describes techniques that operate at a distributed system level, trying to improve aspects such as resource allocation, scheduling, and network traffic management. This work aims to review the state of the art on energy efficiency and to foster research on schemes to make network and computing resources more efficient.

https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00767582/document

A survey on techniques for improving the energy efficiency of large-scale distributed systems

Energy-efficient designs have played import roles for hardware and software implementations for a decade. With the advanced technology of VLSI circuit designs, energy-efficiency can be achieved by adopting the dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) technique. In this paper, we survey the studies for energy-efficient scheduling in real-time systems on DVS platforms to cover both theoretical and practical issues.

Energy-Efficient Scheduling for Real-Time Systems on Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) Platforms

To program in distributed computing environments such as grids and clouds, workflow is adopted as an attractive paradigm for its powerful ability in expressing a wide range of applications, including scientific computing, multi-tier Web, and big data processing applications. With the development of cloud technology and extensive deployment of cloud platform, the problem of workflow scheduling in cloud becomes an important research topic. The challenges of the problem lie in: NP-hard nature of task-resource mapping; diverse QoS requirements; on-demand resource provisioning; performance fluctuation and failure handling; hybrid resource scheduling; data storage and transmission optimization. Consequently, a number of studies, focusing on different aspects, emerged in the literature. In this paper, we firstly conduct taxonomy and comparative review on workflow scheduling algorithms. Then, we make a comprehensive survey of workflow scheduling in cloud environment in a problem---solution manner. Based on the analysis, we also highlight some research directions for future investigation.

Workflow scheduling in cloud: a survey

This work targets energy-efficient scheduling of periodic real-time tasks over multiple DVS processors with the considerations of power consumption due to leakage current. A polynomial-time algorithm with a 1.283 approximation bound is proposed when the overheads in turning on/off a processor are negligible. When the overheads are non-negligible, we develop polynomial-time algorithms with a 2 approximation bound. A series of simulation experiments was done for the performance evaluation of the proposed algorithms. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithms could derive schedules very close to optimal solutions.

Leakage-Aware Energy-Efficient Scheduling of Real-Time Tasks in Multiprocessor 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

N. Rastogi

Papers

Energy aware scheduling for distributed real-time systems