Crown scheduling: Energy-efficient resource allocation, mapping and discrete frequency scaling for collections of malleable streaming tasks

We investigate the problem of generating energy-optimal code for a collection of streaming tasks that include parallelizable or malleable tasks on a generic many-core processor with dynamic discrete frequency scaling. Streaming task collections differ from classical task sets in that all tasks are running concurrently, so that cores typically run several tasks that are scheduled round-robin at user level in a data driven way. A stream of data flows through the tasks and intermediate results are forwarded to other tasks like in a pipelined task graph. In this paper we present crown scheduling, a novel technique for the combined optimization of resource allocation, mapping and discrete voltage/frequency scaling for malleable streaming task sets in order to optimize energy efficiency given a throughput constraint. We present optimal off-line algorithms for separate and integrated crown scheduling based on integer linear programming (ILP). We also propose extensions for dynamic rescaling to automatically adapt a given crown schedule in situations where not all tasks are data ready. Our energy model considers both static idle power and dynamic power consumption of the processor cores. Our experimental evaluation of the ILP models for a generic manycore architecture shows that at least for small and medium sized task sets even the integrated variant of crown scheduling can be solved to optimality by a state-of-the-art ILP solver within a few seconds.