Energy efficient task allocation for hybrid main memory architecture

Compared with the conventional dynamic random access memory (DRAM), emerging non-volatile memory technologies provide better density and energy efficiency. However, current NVM devices typically suffer from high write power, long write latency and low write endurance. In this paper, we study the task allocation problem for the hybrid main memory architecture with both DRAM and PRAM, in order to leverage system performance and the energy consumption of the memory subsystem via assigning different memory devices for each individual task. For an embedded system with a static set of periodical tasks, we design an integer linear programming (ILP) based offline adaptive space allocation (offline-ASA) algorithm to obtain the optimal task allocation. Furthermore, we propose an online adaptive space allocation (online-ASA) algorithm for dynamic task set where arrivals of tasks are not known in advance. Experimental results show that our proposed schemes achieve 27.01% energy saving on average, with additional performance cost of 13.6%. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.