Poster Abstract: Memory-Aware Response Time Analysis for P-FRP Tasks

Summary form only given. Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) is playing and potentially going to play a more important role in real-time systems. Priority-based (preemptive) FRP (P-FRP), a variant of FRP with more real-time characteristics, demands more research in its scheduling and timing analysis. In a P-FRP system, similar to a classic preemptive system, a higher priority task can preempt a lower-priority one and make the latter abort. The lower-priority task will restart after the higher priority tasks complete their execution. However, unlike the classic preemptive model, when a task aborts, all the changes made by the task are discarded (Abort and Restart). In previous studies, the value of Worst Case Execution Time (WCET) of a task is used for all its restarted tasks. However, in practice restarted tasks likely consume less time than WCET when considering the memory effect such as cache-hit in loading code and data. Here we consider a typical task life cycle without being interrupted (cold started task): (1) code is loaded from hard drive and data is loaded from main memory; (2) computation is done by processor(s); (3) results are committed to main memory. In the P-FRP model, the time spent in phase (2) and (3) is wasted when a task is aborted, however, since the existence of memory hierarchy, the time spent in phase (1) can be less when a task is restarted, for example, the task code is still in cache and does not need to be read from slow main memory again. This memory effect is not considered in previous studies of P-FRP systems. In this paper, we present our preliminary memory-aware P-FRP task response time analysis and experimental results. Our ongoing research is to present more theoretical response time analysis and priority assignment research in the memory-aware P-FRP task scheduling. And since the execution time difference is likely related to data placement/locality, we will address this difference in our multi-core P-FRP task scheduling research too.