Worst-Case Temperature Guarantees for Real-Time Applications on Multi-Core Systems

Lars Schor, Iuliana Bacivarov, Hoeseok Yang, and Lothar Thiele.
In In Proc. of the 18th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium, RTAS 2012, Beijing, China, April 2012. IEEE Computer.
Due to increased on-chip power density, multi-core systems face various thermal issues. In particular, exceeding a certain threshold temperature can reduce the system’s performance and reliability. Therefore, when designing a real-time application with non-deterministic workload, the designer has to be aware of the maximum possible temperature of the system. This paper proposes an analytic method to calculate an upper bound on the worst-case peak temperature of a realtime system with multiple cores generated under all possible scenarios of task executions. In order to handle a broad range of uncertainties, task arrivals are modeled as periodic event streams with jitter and delay. Finally, the proposed method is applied to a multi-core ARM platform and our results are validated in various case studies.