Fault-Tolerant Energy Management for Highly Dependable Real-Time Embedded Systems

实时嵌入式系统（RTES）在全球日常生活中无处不在，目前在智能手机、智能汽车和航空/航天器等众多应用中都有发现。使用RTES的设备数量的增加，以及对更高性能的需求，要求改进能源管理解决方案，在不牺牲性能的情况下遏制能源消耗。另一方面，容错也是普适和泛在计算平台中的一个主要问题。该项目将为RTES开发新的能量管理算法，同时满足容错要求。这一发现将从根本上改变RTES的设计方式，使其能够满足“绿色和高度可靠”计算平台的性能要求。因此，这项工作的结果不仅会对该行业的财务收益产生巨大的全球影响，而且还会对环境健康产生巨大影响。此外，该项目将研究与教育相结合，为本科生和研究生的研究人员提供独特的实践研究经验，使他们能够应用理论学习，并激励他们探索计算机科学的职业生涯。最后，这项工作旨在为未来的技术进步奠定基础，这可以增加这个国家的竞争优势，同时也提供社会效益。在这个项目中，将设计一个新的调度框架，以提高高可靠性实时嵌入式系统（RTES）在容错要求下的性能，利用异构多核处理器中可用的现代电源管理功能。研究的三个具体目标是：(1)开发新的能源管理方案，在容错要求下降低实时嵌入式系统（RTES）的能源消耗；(2)在硬能源预算约束下，开发以容错RTES可行性最大化为目标的调度框架算法；(3)将此调度框架扩展到多核心平台。该项目的新颖之处在于，它将RTES设计的三个关键维度，即能效、容错和服务质量（QoS），整合到一个单一的、统一的框架中，在从系统层面满足RTES QoS的同时，降低了能耗，最大限度地提高了可行性。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Real-time embedded systems (RTES) are ubiquitous and pervasive in everyday life worldwide, currently found in numerous applications ranging from smart phones to intelligent cars and air/spacecraft. The increased number of devices that use RTES, in conjunction with the demand for ever greater performance, call for improved energy management solutions to stem energy consumption without sacrificing performance. On the other hand, fault tolerance has also been a major concern in pervasive and ubiquitous computing platforms. The proposed project will develop new energy management algorithms for RTES while satisfying the fault tolerance requirement. The findings will radically shift how RTES are designed to be able to meet performance demands on a “green and highly dependable” computing platform. As such, the results of this work can also have an enormous global impact not only on the industry’s financial gains, but also on the environment’s health. Furthermore, this project integrates research and education by providing undergraduate and graduate researchers with hands-on unique research experiences where they can apply theoretical learning and can inspire them to explore a career in computer science. Finally, this work intends to lay the groundwork for future technological advances which can increase the competitive edge of this country while also providing societal benefits.In this project, a novel scheduling framework will be designed to improve the performance of highly dependable real-time embedded systems (RTES) under fault tolerance requirements, exploiting modern power-management features available in heterogeneous multi-core processors. Three Specific Aims will be addressed: (1) to develop novel energy management schemes that can reduce energy consumption for real-time embedded systems (RTES) under fault tolerance requirement; (2) to develop algorithms that can create a scheduling framework targeting maximizing the feasibility of fault tolerant RTES under hard energy budget constraint; and (3) to extend this scheduling framework to many-core platforms. The novelty of the project lies in the fact that it combines the three critical dimensions of RTES design, i.e., energy efficiency, fault tolerance, and Quality of Service (QoS) into a single, unified framework to reduce energy consumption as well as to maximize the feasibility while satisfying the QoS for RTES from the system level.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.