ITR: Rate-based Scheduling Technology for Latency-Sensitive Graphics Applications

University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Abstract

Highly interactive graphics applications have stringent latency requirements to ensure a compelling experience. These requirements are usually met by overprovisioning hardware resources and are validated through ad-hoc testing. Recent advances in real-time scheduling technology could serve as the basis for a more analytical approach. Unfortunately, conventional real-time scheduling disciplines are quite rigid and are usually implemented only within special-purpose real-time operating systems. For these reasons, real-time scheduling techniques have been largely ignored within the graphics community. In this project, a real-time scheduling and analysis framework will be developed for latency-sensitive graphics applications. This framework will extend recent work on rate-based processor scheduling. The proposed framework will allow timing requirements to be specified as average rates and will be highly tolerant of any deviance from specified rates. The proposed rate-based framework will be evaluated through research involving the nanoManipulator system (www.cs.unc.edu/Research/nano). The nanoManipulator couples a scanning tunneling microscope or atomic force microscope to a virtual-reality graphics display and a haptic interface to provide a telepresence system. The existing nanoManipulator is not multi-threaded, and thus the system is difficult to modify and analyze. In this project, a fully multi-threaded version of the nanoManipulator will be developed using the proposed framework.