Fast multiprocessor scheduling with fixed task binding of large scale industrial cyber physical systems

Latest trends in embedded platform architectures show a steady shift from high frequency single core platforms to lower-frequency but highly-parallel execution platforms. Scheduling applications with stringent latency requirements on such multiprocessor platforms is challenging. Our work is motivated by the scheduling challenges faced by ASML, the world's leading provider of wafer scanners. A wafer scanner is a complex cyber-physical system that manipulates silicon wafers with extreme accuracy at high throughput. Typical control applications of the wafer scanner consist of thousands of precedence-constrained tasks with latency requirements. Machines are customized so that precise characteristics of the control applications to be scheduled and the execution platform are only known during machine start-up. This results in large-scale scheduling problems that need to be solved during start-up of the machine under a strict timing constraint on the schedule delivery time. This paper introduces a fast and scalable static-order scheduling approach for applications with stringent latency requirements and a fixed binding on multiprocessor platforms. It uses a heuristic that makes scheduling decisions based on a new metric to find feasible schedules that meet timing requirements as quickly as possible and it is shown to be scalable to very large task graphs. The computation of this metric exploits the binding information of the application. The approach will be incorporated into the ASML's latest generation of wafer scanners.