A Near-optimal Solution for the Heterogeneous Multi-processor Single-level Voltage Setup Problem

A heterogeneous multi-processor (HeMP) system consists of several heterogeneous processors, each of which is specially designed to deliver the best energy-saving performance for a particular category of applications. A low-power real-time scheduling algorithm is required to schedule tasks on such a system to minimize its energy consumption and complete all tasks by their deadline. The problem of determining the optimal speed for each processor to minimize the total energy consumption is called the voltage setup problem. This paper provides a near-optimal solution for the HeMP single-level voltage setup problem. To our best knowledge, we are the first work that addresses this problem. Initially, each task is assigned to a processor in a local-optimal manner. We next propose a couple of solutions to reduce energy by migrating tasks between processors. Finally, we determine each processor's speed by its final workload and the deadline. We conducted a series of simulations to evaluate our algorithms. The results show that the local-optimal partition leads to a considerably better energy-saving schedule than a commonly-used homogeneous multi-processor scheduling algorithm. Furthermore, at all measurable configurations, our energy consumption is at most 3% more than the optimal value obtained by an exhaustive iteration of all possible task-to-processor assignments. In summary, our work is shown to provide a near-optimal solution at its polynomial-time complexity.