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

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 real-time 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.