Energy Minimization for Parallel Real-Time Systems with Malleable Jobs and Homogeneous Frequencies

In this work, we investigate the potential utility of parallelization for meeting real-time constraints and minimizing energy. We consider malleable Gang scheduling of implicit-deadline sporadic tasks upon multiprocessors. We first show the non-necessity of dynamic voltage/frequency regarding optimality of our scheduling problem. We adapt the canonical schedule for DVFS multiprocessor platforms and propose a polynomial-time optimal processor/frequency-selection algorithm. We evaluate the performance of our algorithm via simulations using parameters obtained from a hardware testbed implementation. Our algorithm has up to a 60 watt decrease in power consumption over the optimal non-parallel approach.