Accurate ILP-Based Contention Modeling on Statically Scheduled Multicore Systems

Commercially available Off The Shelf (COTS) multicores have been assessed as the baseline computing platform even in the most conservative real-time domains. Multicore contention arising on shared hardware resources, with its circular dependence with scheduling, is among the most challenging issues that require urgent attention before multicores can be fully embraced for real-time computing. In the context of static scheduling, still the most used scheduling approach in real-time industries, we propose an ILP formulation for computing the worst-case contention delay suffered by a task due to interference on a shared bus. Our model provides accurate contention delay bounds that avoid unnecessary over-accounting of conflicts between bus requests, by considering contention effects at system-level (i.e., across tasks) rather than at task-level only. This allows precisely capturing the interdependence between timing interference of conflicting requests, issued in parallel by other cores (tasks), and the identification of the particular set of tasks co-running on those cores. We assess our technique both analytically and empirically on a real COTS multicore platform. We show, via extensive evaluation, that jointly accounting for worst-case task overlapping and request distribution scenarios always provides tighter contention bounds when compared to state-of-the-art solutions.