Towards scheduling hard real-time image processing tasks on a single GPU

Graphics Processing Units (GPU) are becoming the key hardware accelerators in the emerging image processing applications such as self-driving cars and mobile augmented reality systems. As GPUs execute launched workloads non-preemptively, their usage in safety-critical systems with hard real-time constraints is impeded. The existing solutions for scheduling real-time tasks on a single GPU focus on soft real-time systems. In this paper, we consider real-time systems with a single dedicated GPU handling sporadic tasks with hard deadlines and propose a scheduling approach based on time division multiplexing called the GPU-TDMh - a lightweight middleware framework located between the application and the GPU driver layers. We evaluate the proposed approach on a matrix multiplication benchmark on a heterogeneous platform. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method as well as superiority over the non-preemptive online scheduling policies.