Work-in-Progress: Enhanced Energy-Aware Standby-Sparing Techniques for Fixed-Priority Hard Real-Time Systems

For real-time computing systems, energy efficiency and reliability are two primary design concerns. In this research work, we study the problem of enhanced energy-aware standby-sparing for fixed-priority (FP) hard real-time systems under reliability requirement. The standby-sparing system adopts a primary processor and a spare processor to provide fault tolerance for both permanent and transient faults. In order to keep the energy consumption for such kind of systems under control, we explore enhanced fixed-priority scheduling schemes to minimize the overlapped concurrent executions of the workloads on the primary processor and on the spare processor, enabling energy savings. Moreover, efficient online scheduling techniques are under development to boost the energy savings during runtime while preserving the system reliability.