Thermal-aware Adaptive Platform Management for Heterogeneous Embedded Systems

Recent trends in real-time applications have raised the demand for high-throughput embedded platforms with integrated CPU-GPU based Systems-On-Chip (SoCs). The enhanced performance of such SoCs, however, comes at the cost of increased power consumption, resulting in significant heat dissipation and high on-chip temperatures. The prolonged occurrences of high on-chip temperature can cause accelerated in-circuit ageing, which severely degrades the long-term performance and reliability of the chip. Violation of thermal constraints leads to on-board dynamic thermal management kicking-in, which may result in timing unpredictability for real-time tasks due to transient performance degradation. Recent work in adaptive software design have explored this issue from a control theoretic stand-point, striving for smooth thermal envelopes by tuning the core frequency.

Existing techniques do not handle thermal violations for periodic real-time task sets in the presence of dynamic events like change of task periodicity, more so in the context of heterogeneous SoCs with integrated CPU-GPUs. This work presents an OpenCL runtime extension for thermal-aware scheduling of periodic, real-time tasks on heterogeneous multi-core platforms. Our framework mitigates dynamic thermal violations by adaptively tuning task mapping parameters, with the eventual control objective of satisfying both platform-level thermal constraints and task-level deadline constraints. We consider multiple platform-level control actions like task migration, frequency tuning and idle slot insertion as the task mapping parameters. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that considers such a variety of task mapping control actions in the context of heterogeneous embedded platforms. We evaluate the proposed framework on an Odroid-XU4 board using OpenCL benchmarks and demonstrate its effectiveness in reducing thermal violations.