Two Papers Accepted at ECRTS 2016!

Two papers have been accepted for presentation at the 28th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2016) in Toulouse, France. The first paper is entitled “Cache-Persistence-Aware Response-Time Analysis for Fixed-Priority Preemptive Systems” as is a collaboration with Syed Aftab Rashid, Geoffrey Nelissen, and Eduardo Tovar from CISTER and Damien Hardy and Isabelle Puaut from University of Rennes. This paper presents a WCRT analysis for single-core fixed-priority preemptive systems that exploits persistent cache blocks that are known to be in the cache to reduce WCRT.

The title of the second paper is “Contention-Free Execution of Automotive Applications on a Clustered Many-Core Platform” that was written together with Borislav Nikolic and Vincent Nelis from CISTER, Matthias Becker and Thomas Nolte from MRTC, and Dakshina Dasari from Bosch. This work presents a contention-free execution framework for automotive applications on many-core platforms, which combines privatization of memory banks together with defined access phases to shared memory resources. An Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation is presented to find the optimal time-triggered schedule for execution as well as for accesses to shared memory. Additionally, a heuristic solution is presented that generates the schedule in a fraction of the time required by the ILP.

New Book Available for Pre-order

Our new book “Memory Controllers for Mixed-Time-Criticality Systems: Architectures, Methodologies and Trade-offs” is now available for pre-order at Springer. The book is based on the excellent PhD thesis of Sven Goossens and discusses the design and FPGA implementation of a real-time memory controller for mixed-criticality systems. The controller can provide complete temporal isolation to its clients as well as hard bounds on the worst-case response time of transactions and the bandwidth offered by the memory. In addition, it provides competitive average-case performance for soft real-time and best-effort applications using a conservative open-page policy. The design is highly configurable and the book carefully quantifies the trade-offs between bandwidth, response time, and power that this enables. To facilitate the discussion about power, the book also presents the power model that came out of the PhD dissertation of Karthik Chandrasekar and gives an up-to-date description of the open-source DRAMPower tool that implements it.

Update: The contents of the book are now available on SpringerLink

New Position at TNO-ESI

Today, I started a new position as a Research Fellow at Embedded Systems Innovation by TNO (TNO-ESI) in Eindhoven. TNO-ESI is a leading Dutch research group for high-tech embedded systems design and engineering. It has a close cooperation with high-tech industry, as well as a strong association with fundamental research of academia, both national and international. This means I am now transitioning to applied science in an industrial setting and I look forward to the new challenges and opportunities that entails.

I want to thank the good people a CISTER for the time I have spent with the unit. I find it a very nice place to work with good researchers and a friendly atmosphere. I appreciate the intellectual freedom I had to pursue my ideas and interests, as well as the interesting collaborations and growth opportunities I got sucked into. I hope we will have the pleasure of working together again in the future.

Paper Accepted at RTAS 2016

Yonghui Li is on a roll! Two months ago he received the best paper award at ESTIMEDIA for his work on modelling and analysis of a dynamically scheduled DRAM controller using mode-controlled data-flow graphs. Now, he just had a paper entitled “Modeling and Verification of Dynamic Command Scheduling for Real-Time Memory Controllers” that models and analyses the same memory controller using timed atomata. A key highlight of this work is that it quantitatively compares data-flow analysis, timed automata, and two other approaches from Yonghui’s 2015 article in Real-Time Systems in terms of guaranteed bandwidth and worst-case execution time. This gives interesting insights into what these different approaches can and cannot model and what the impact of those limitations are on the performance guarantees. This work was the result of a fruitful collaboration with Kai Lampka from Uppsala University in Sweden.

Sven Goossens Successfully Defended Dissertation

After successfully defending his dissertation “A Reconfigurable Mixed-Time-Criticality SDRAM Controller“, Sven Goossens earned himself a PhD degree and the right to call himself a doctor. The work proposes a pattern-based SDRAM controller targeting mixed-time-criticality systems, i.e. systems where some memory clients need firm worst-case guarantees on bandwidth and latency, while other clients only care about average-case performance. A new memory controller architecture is designed to address this mix of requirements and it is implemented both as a cycle-accurate SystemC simulation model and as synthesizable RTL code for generating FPGA instances. A unique feature of this memory controller is its conservative open-page policy that leaves rows open in the memory banks as long as possible to exploit locality and boost average-case performance, but closes them just in time to avoid reducing the worst-case performance.

The work also parameterizes the concept of memory patterns by allowing the number of banks and the number of bursts per bank to be chosen when the patterns are generated. This allows patterns with different degrees of bank-level parallelism to be created for six different generations of DRAM for any request size, enabling the user to make a trade-off between worst-case bandwidth, worst-case response time, and power consumption. To generate efficient memory patterns, the work proposes an integer linear programming formulation that provides optimal patterns, as well as a near-optimal heuristic that runs in a fraction of the time. In addition to generating predictable memory patterns that provide bounded bandwidth and execution times, composable read and write patterns can be generated with negligible performance loss. These patterns have equal length and can be used to provide complete temporal isolation between memory clients when combined with a non-work-conserving Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) arbiter in the front-end. The memory patterns are generated offline at design time, but are programmed at run-time when the memory controller is initialized. Lastly, the proposed controller supports run-time reconfiguration of its TDM arbiter, allowing it to be safely reprogrammed when applications dynamically start and stop at run-time without sacrificing the worst-case guarantees of applications that keep running.

I would like to thank Sven for the five years of hard work. It has been a pleasure to work with such a versatile and independent young researcher who seems to be succesful at whatever he attempts, be it design, analysis, writing papers, or hardware/software implementation in more or lesss any language. He has also been an excellent member of the Memory Team and the larger CompSoC Team, never passing on an opportunity to use his skills to support other members of the team. At the end of January, Sven starts his new career with Intrinsic-ID in Eindhoven. We wish him the best of luck with his new job and hope to stay in touch.

Article Accepted in Journal of Systems and Software

Congratulations to Anna Minaeva for having her article “Scalable and Efficient Configuration of Time-Division Multiplexed Resources” accepted in Journal of Systems and Software. The article is an extension of our conference paper “An Efficient Configuration Methodology for Time-Division Multiplexed Single Resources” that was presented at the Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS) earlier this year. The original conference paper addresses the problem of configuring a Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) arbiter that provides access to a single shared resource, such as a memory, in a way the satisfies the bandwidth and latency requirements of all memory clients. This is achieved using an optimized Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation.

The newly accepted article extends the problem scope to consider more complex system with a larger number of memory clients and a longer TDM frame. For large problems, the previous ILP formulation takes unpractically long to solve, which is addressed by using it as a building block in a Branch and Price framework to improve its scalability. This approach decomposes the problem into smaller sub-problems and uses more sophisticated exploration methods to navigate the search-space, enabling the number of clients to be increased by up to a factor of 8 compared to the original ILP formulation.

Hazem Ali in HiPEAC Newsletter

Last year, my PhD student Hazem Ali got a HiPEAC collaboration grant sponsoring a three month visit in the Electronic Systems group at Eindhoven University of Technology, hosted by Dr. Sander Stuijk. The topic of the joint research is related to the borderland between data-flow and traditional real-time analysis. On page 15 in the latest issue of the HiPEAC Newsletter, you can read more about his stay.

Yonghui Li Wins Best Paper Award at ESTIMEDIA

We won the Best Paper Award at the 13th IEEE Symposium on Embedded Systems for Real-Time Multimedia (ESTIMedia) for our paper “Mode-Controlled Data-Flow Modeling of Real-Time Memory Controllers“. The paper was first-authored by Yonghui Li and was a successful collaboration with Orlando Moreira (previously with ST-Ericsson, currently with Intel) and two of his PhD students at Eindhoven University of Technology. We are happy that our work was well-received and hope the community will like the paper.

Manil Dev Gomony Successfully Defends PhD Thesis!

Today, Manil Dev Gomony has successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Scalable and Bandwidth-Efficient Memory Subsystem Design for Real-Time Systems“. The thesis proposes an architecture for a real-time memory subsystem that scales well in terms of area and maximum synthesizable frequency with an increasing number of memory clients. This subsystem architecture comprises a memory interconnect called Globally Arbitrated Memory Tree (GAMT) a Multi-Channel Memory Controller (MCMC), as well as a technique to couple those components and have a single point of arbitration for both resources. The thesis also proposes a design flow for automatically choosing the memory device, mapping clients to memory channel, and configure arbiters to satisfy client requirements.

Among Manil’s achievements, we specifically highlight two achievements with respect to publishing. First of all, he had a paper accepted at the DATE conference every year during his PhD. Secondly, none of his publications were ever rejected anywhere. This shows that Manil managed to publish in competitive forums in his field and that his work was well-received. Currently, Manil works as a Researcher at Bell Laboratories of Alcatel-Lucent in Belgium. We wish him the best of luck in his future career!

H2020 Project HERCULES in Grant Agreement Preparation

The European Commission just notified us that our H2020 IA project HERCULES (High-pErformance Real-time arChitectUres for Low-power Embedded Systems) has reached the stage of grant agreement preparation. Earlier this year, I took the lead on this proposal on behalf of CTU Prague and also contributed more generally to the preparation. Given the competitive nature of H2020, I am pleased to see that the work was well received. A particular congratulations to Marko Bertogna and his team at University of Modena for their hard work on coordinating this proposal. Now let’s hope the negotiation phase goes well!

Project HERCULES has the ambitious goal to provide the required technological infrastructure to obtain an order-of-magnitude improvement in the cost and power consumption of next generation real-time applications. It will develop an integrated framework to allow achieving predictable performance on top of cutting-edge heterogeneous COTS multi-core platforms, implementing real-time scheduling techniques and execution models recently proposed in the research community. The framework will be applied to two innovative industrial use cases: a pioneering autonomous driving system for the automotive domain, and a visual recognition system for the avionic domain.