A hierarchical multiprocessor scheduling system for DSP applications

This paper discusses a hierarchical scheduling framework which reduces the complexity of scheduling synchronous data flow (SDF) graphs onto multiple processors. The core of this framework is a clustering algorithm that decreases the number of nodes before expanding the SDF graph into a precedence directed acyclic graph (DAG). The internals of the clusters are then scheduled with uniprocessor SDF schedulers which can optimize for memory usage. The clustering is done in such a manner as to leave ample parallelism exposed for the multiprocessor scheduler. We have developed the SDF composition theorem for testing if a clustering step is valid. The advantages of this framework are demonstrated with several practical, real-time examples.