Design of a hard real-time multi-core testbed for energy measurement

This paper presents a systematic methodology for designing a hard real-time multi-core testbed to validate and benchmark various rate monotonic scheduling (RMS)-based task allocation and scheduling schemes in energy consumption. The hard real-time multi-core testbed comprises Intel Core Duo T2500 processor with dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) capability and runs the Linux Fedora 8 operating system supporting soft real-time scheduling. POSIX threads API and Linux FIFO scheduling policy are utilized to facilitate the design and Dhrystone-based tasks are generated to verify the design. A LabView-based DAQ system is designed to measure the energy consumption of CPU and system board of the testbed. A case study of task allocation and scheduling algorithms is also presented that aim to optimize the schedule feasibility and energy consumed by the processor and memory module in the multi-core platform. The experience from the implementation is summarized to serve as potential guidelines for other researchers and practitioners. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.