Bus scheduling implementation on the cell processor
Deepti K. Chivukula · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 2010
Real-time computing is the study of hardware and software systems that are subject to a ???real-time constraint??? - i.e., strict deadline guarantees. With uncontrollable cache and front side bus, in the modern computer architectures, the estimation of a tight bound, worst case execution time (WCET) is difficult. The new generation computer architecture, Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA), has a software controlled front side bus (i.e. Element Interconnect Bus) that helps moderate the unpredictable task execution time problem. The CBEA is a heterogeneous chip system containing one Power Processing Element (PPE) and eight Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs), each having an internal independent local storage memory. In this thesis, using CBEA as a platform, I implemented an interrupt based scheduling framework that uses Element Interconnect Bus (EIB) in a temporally predictable manner. The framework is built by abstracting away low-level architectural features. Experiments were also performed to show that the real-time transactions of feasible transaction sets are executed before deadline when scheduled according to a real-time scheduling algorithm, while the same transactions can miss their deadlines when scheduled according to an arbitrary (non-real-time) scheduling policy.