Real-time task scheduling for FPGA-based multicore systems with communication delay

Efficient scheduling is critical for achieving high performance in the multicore computing environment. This paper focuses on the scheduling problem for the real-time applications in the FPGA-based multicore structure with an objective to minimize the makespan under hardware resource constraints. To address this problem, we propose a priority-driven scheduling algorithm, called the Real-Time Priority-driven Algorithm (ReTPA). In this method, we first allocate the tasks into software and hardware computing units based on their hardware resource constraints. Then scheduling is performed to minimize the makespan. We further extend ReTPA with communication scheduling to improve the scheduling efficiency in the communication-intensive applications, which is called Communication-based Real-Time Priority-driven Algorithm (CReTPA). Our experimental results confirm the efficiency of the proposed algorithms in applications with different scales or different computation-communication ratios. Besides, we compare the two proposed algorithms with a classic priority-driven algorithm, HEFT, an advanced priority-driven algorithm, HETS, and two advanced genetic algorithms, GAA and MGAA, proposed by Abdallah et al. in 2019. The performance comparisons illustrate that our algorithms, ReTPA and CReTPA, both show the outstanding performance and CReTPA obtains the most reasonable solutions within the shortest scheduling time for communication-intensive applications.