Efficient Contention-Aware Scheduling of SDF Graphs on Shared Multi-Bank Memory

Novel memory architectures have been introduced in multi/many-core processors to address the performance bottle neck due to shared memory accesses. Taking the advantages brought by these architectures in scheduling analysis is still an open challenge. In this article, we present a scheduling analysis technique that exploits a shared multi-bank memory architecture to efficiently schedule parallel real-time applications modeled as synchronous data flow (SDF) graphs by minimizing the memory access contentions. Our approach aims at producing a static time-triggered schedule with the objective of minimizing the makespan and buffer size requirements while respecting consistency and data dependency constraints. An Integer Linear Programming formulation of the scheduling problem is presented, as well as a heuristic with significantly lower time complexity. Experimental results are given using synthetic SDF graphs generated by the SDF3 tool and applications available in the StreamIt benchmark.