A unified online directed acyclic graph flow manager for multicore schedulers

Numerous Directed-Acyclic Graph (DAG) schedulers have been developed to improve the energy efficiency of various multi-core systems. However, the DAG monitoring modules proposed by these schedulers make a priori assumptions about the workload and relationship between the task dependencies. Thus, schedulers are limited to work on a limited subset of DAG models. To address this problem, we propose a unified online DAG monitoring solution independent from the connected scheduler and able to handle all possible DAG models. Our novel low-complexity solution processes online the DAG of the application and provides relevant information about each task that can be used by any scheduler connected to it. Using H.264/AVC video decoding as an illustrative application and multiple configurations of complex synthetic DAGs, we demonstrate that our solution connected to an external simple energy-efficient scheduler is able to achieve significant improvements in energy-efficiency and deadline miss rates compared to existing approaches.