Saving energy without defying deadlines on mobile GPU-based heterogeneous systems

With the advent of low-power programmable compute cores based on GPUs, GPU-equipped heterogeneous platforms are becoming common in a wide spectrum of industries including safety-critical domains like the automotive industry. While the suitability of GPUs for throughput oriented applications is well-accepted, their applicability for real-time applications remains an open issue. Moreover, in mobile/embedded systems, energy-efficient computing is a major concern and yet, there has been no systematic study on the energy savings that GPUs may potentially provide. In this paper, we propose an approach to utilize both the GPU and the CPU in a heterogeneous fashion to meet the deadlines of a real-time application while ensuring that we maximize the energy savings. We note that GPUs are inherently built to maximize the throughput and this poses a major challenge when deadlines must be satisfied. The problem becomes more acute when we consider the fact that GPUs are more energy efficient than CPUs and thus, a naive approach that is based on maximizing GPU utilization might easily lead to infeasible solutions from a deadline perspective.