Real-time divisible load theory: A perspective

Current real-time application systems demand complex functionality and are increasingly coming to be implemented upon multiprocessor platforms, with complex synchronization, data-sharing and parallelism requirements. However, the formal models for representing real-time workloads have traditionally been designed in the context of uniprocessor environments; hence, they are often not able to accurately represent relevant features of multiprocessor realtime systems. Researchers have recently addressed this shortcoming by applying workload models from Divisible Load Theory (DLT) to real-time systems. The resulting theory, referred to as Real-time Divisible Load Theory (RT-DLT), holds great promise for modeling an emergent class of massively parallel real-time workloads. However, the theory needs strong formal foundations before it can be widely used for the design and analysis of real-time systems. In this paper, we briefly describe our current findings on RT-DLT and ongoing research efforts at extending this work to develop such formal foundations. © 2009 IEEE.