Minimizing energy consumption with reliability goal on heterogeneous embedded systems

The embedded systems generally require to be low-powered and highly reliable. In order to achieve the low-power design goal, dynamic voltage frequency scaling (DVFS) technique has been widely employed in various embedded application scenarios. However, DVFS reduces execution frequency, which increases transient faults of the processor dramatically. As a result, the reliability of the application will be severely reduced. In this paper, we aim at minimizing energy consumption with reliability goal for parallel application on heterogeneous embedded systems. Since the reliability of the application is the product of the reliability of all the tasks that belong to the application, the reliability goal of the application is transformed into the reliability goal of each task. Considering that some systems may not support DVFS techniques, two methods are proposed to transform the reliability goal of the application into each task for non-DVFS and DVFS, respectively. Based on the reliability goal transformation methods, two energy-efficient scheduling algorithms with the reliability goal are designed. Experiments with real parallel applications demonstrate that the proposed algorithms have significant improvements in energy efficiency compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.