METERG: Measurement-Based End-to-End Performance Estimation Technique in QoS-Capable Multiprocessors

Multiprocessor systems present serious challenges in the design of real-time systems due to the wider variation of execution time of an instruction sequence compared to a uniprocessor system. Even if non-determinism is tightly controlled by adding conventional QoS support, it is generally difficult to find the minimal hardware resource request settings (e.g., memory bandwidth) for a given user-level performance goal (e.g., transactions per second). In this paper, we introduce the METERG (Measurement-Time Enforcement and Run-Time Guarantee) QoS system that provides an easy method of obtaining a tight estimate of the lower bound on end-to-end performance for a given configuration of resource reservations. Every QoS-capable block in the METERG system supports two operation modes for each task requiring QoS: enforcement mode for estimating the lower bound on a task’s execution time and deployment mode for maximizing its performance. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach with an execution-driven multiprocessor simulator implementing the METERG QoS memory subsystem. We show that the performance lower bound is easy to obtain by simply running an application in enforcement mode, and that this estimated lower bound is tight.