Real-Time Scheduling and Analysis of Synchronous OpenMP Task Systems with Tied Tasks

Synchronous parallel tasks are widely used in HPC for purchasing high average performance, but merely consider how to guarantee good timing predictabilities. OpenMP is a promising framework for multi-core real-time embedded systems. The synchronous OpenMP tasks are significantly more difficult to schedule and analyze due to constraints posed by OpenMP specifications. An important OpenMP feature is tied task, which must execute on the same thread during the whole life cycle. This paper designs a novel method, called group scheduling, to schedule synchronous OpenMP tasks, which divides tasks into several groups, and assigns some of them to dedicated cores, in order to isolate tied tasks. We derive a linear-time computable response time bound. Experiments with both randomly generated and realistic OpenMP tasks show that our new bound significantly outperforms the existing bound.