Configuration of Parallel Real-Time Applications on Multi-Core Processors

Abstract

Parallel programming models (e.g., OpenMP) are more and more used to improve the performance of real-time applications in modern processors. Nevertheless, these processors have complex architectures, being very difficult to understand their timing behavior. The main challenge with most of existing works is that they apply static timing analysis for simpler models or measurement-based analysis using traditional platforms (e.g., single core) or considering only sequential algorithms. How to provide an efficient configuration for the allocation of the parallel program in the computing units of the processor is still an open challenge. This paper studies the problem of performing timing analysis on complex multi-core platforms, pointing out a methodology to understand the applications’ timing behavior, and guide the configuration of the platform. As an example, the paper uses an OpenMP-based program of the Heat benchmark on a NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier. The main objectives are to analyze the execution time of OpenMP tasks, specify the best configuration of OpenMP directives, identify critical tasks, and discuss the predictability of the system/application. A Linux perf based measurement tool, which has been extended by our team, is applied to measure each task across multiple executions in terms of total CPU cycles, the number of cache accesses, and the number of cache misses at different cache levels, including L1, L2 and L3. The evaluation process is performed using the measurement of the performance metrics by our tool to study the predictability of the system/application.