Local i ty-Conscious Process Sched u I i ng in Embedded Systems' .

In many embedded systems. existence of a data cache might in- fluence the effectiveness of process scheduling policy significantly. Consequently. a scheduling policy that takes inter-process data reuse into account might result in large performance benefic;. In this pa- per. we focus on array-intensive embedded applications and present a locality-conscious scheduling strategy where we first evaluate the potential data reuse between processes, and then, using the results of this evaluation, select an order for pmcess executions. We also show how process codes can be transformed by an optimizing com- piler for increasing inter-process data reuse, thereby making locality- conscious scheduling more effective. Our experimed resulc; ob- tained using two large. multi-process application codes indicate sig- nificant runtime benefits.