DPCP-p: A Distributed Locking Protocol for Parallel Real-Time Tasks

Real-time scheduling and locking protocols are fundamental facilities to construct time-critical systems. For parallel real-time tasks, predictable locking protocols are required when concurrent sub-jobs mutually exclusive access to shared resources. This paper for the first time studies the distributed synchronization framework of parallel real-time tasks, where both tasks and global resources are partitioned to designated processors, and requests to each global resource are conducted on the processor on which the resource is partitioned. We extend the Distributed Priority Ceiling Protocol (DPCP) for parallel tasks under federated scheduling, with which we proved that a request can be blocked by at most one lower-priority request. We develop task and resource partitioning heuristics and propose analysis techniques to safely bound the task response times. Numerical evaluation (with heavy tasks on 8-, 16-, and 32-core processors) indicates that the proposed methods improve the schedulability significantly compared to the state-of-the-art locking protocols under federated scheduling.