Efficient tasks scheduling in multicore systems integrated with hardware accelerators

Multicore systems integrated with hardware accelerators provide better performance for executing real-time applications in time-critical fields, such as robots, avionics, and aerospace. The integration of hardware accelerators brings new challenges for system scheduling; the software scheduling problem is extended to a hardware–software co-scheduling problem. Efficient co-scheduling strategy maximizes the benefits of hardware acceleration, which is important for time-critical systems. To solve this problem, we propose a co-scheduling strategy to minimize the system execution time. It combines hardware–software resource allocation and a real-time schedule method. Our scheduling can fit the different parallel in software and hardware (e.g., CPUs and FPGAs). The key component of our strategy is its novel hardware–software resource allocation and a high-performance heuristic scheduling algorithm. In the experiments, we evaluate our approach using both simulated and real parallel applications. The results illustrate that our algorithm obtains efficient solutions within reasonable runtimes compared to the state of the art.