Fixed-Priority Allocation and Scheduling for Energy-Efficient Fault Tolerance in Hard Real-Time Multiprocessor Systems.

Energy-efficient task allocation and scheduling schemes with deterministic fault-tolerant capabilities are proposed for symmetric multiprocessor systems executing tasks with hard real-time constraints. The proposed heuristic achieves energy savings by optimally balancing the application workload among processors in a system. Based on the observation that a fault-free operation is expected to remain dominant in the near future and the probability of the worst case faults is low, an optimistic fault-tolerant heuristic is then proposed to achieve optimum energy savings in the absence of faults and meet application timing requirements in the worst case faults at the cost of energy inefficiency. Extensive simulation experiment results show that when compared to the state-of-art schemes, the proposed optimistic heuristic achieves average energy savings of up to 70 percent and exhibits higher tolerance to variations in application utilizations and more resilience to fault occurrences beyond system specification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]