Thermal-Aware Global Real-Time Scheduling on Multicore Systems

As the power density of modern electronic circuits increases dramatically, systems are prone to overheating. Thermal management has become a prominent issue in system design. This paper explores thermal-aware scheduling for sporadic real-time tasks to minimize the peak temperature in a homogeneous multicore system, in which heat might transfer among some cores. By deriving an ideally preferred speed for each core, we propose global scheduling algorithms which can exploit the flexibility of multicore platforms at low temperature. Compared with load-balancing strategies, the proposed algorithms can significantly reduce the peak temperature by up to 30degC to 70degC for simulated platforms.