My contract with Czech Technical University in Prague has run its course. However, the good people at the CISTER/INESC TEC research unit at the Polytechnic Institute of Porto, my former employer, was quick to offer me a temporary contract until a new long-term plan is in place. At my new job, I will continue my research on real-time embedded systems, just like before, as well as preparing project proposals to fund future research. I thank CISTER for the opportunity and look forward work with them again!
Article Accepted in Science of Computer Programming
The past two months have been very good to us with five journal articles being accepted in something resembling a ketchup-effect. The most recent addition is an article entitled “Certifying Execution Time in Multicores” that was accepted by the Elsevier journal Science of Computer Programming. In essence, this article is a summary of the PhD dissertation of Vitor Rodrigues, whom I collaborated with over the past years. My main contribution to this work is proposing the latency-rate model as an abstraction of the service provided by a shared resource, such as a memory. We incorporated this model into Vitors timing analysis tool based on abstract interpretation to enable scalable timing analysis of multi-core platforms with shared resources.
ACM TECS Accepts Another Journal Article
ACM Transaction of Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) recently informed us that our article “Maximizing the Number of Good Dies for Streaming Applications in NoC-based MPSoCs under Process Variation” has been accepted for publication. This work nicely summarizes the dissertation of Davit Mirzoyan from his four year PhD studies at Delft University of Technology under the supervision of Kees Goossens and myself.
The article addresses design of real-time systems for streaming applications constrained by a throughput requirement with reduced design margins, referred to as better than worst-case design. The first contribution is a complete modeling framework that captures a streaming application mapped to a NoC-based multiprocessor system with voltage-frequency islands under process-induced die-to-die and within-die frequency variations. The framework is used to analyze the impact of variations in the frequency of hardware components on application throughput at the system level. The second contribution is a methodology to use the proposed framework and estimate the impact of reducing circuit design margins on the number of good dies that satisfy the throughput requirement of a real-time streaming application. It is shown on both synthetic and real applications that the proposed design approach can increase the number of good dies by up to 9.6% and 18.8% for designs with and without fixed SRAM and IO blocks, respectively.
Article Accepted in Real-Time Systems Journal
A journal article entitled “A Framework for Memory Contention Analysis in Multi-Core Platforms” has been accepted for publication in Real-Time Systems. This article is a collaboration with Dakshina Dasari and Vincent Nelis and is a result from the time I spent with the CISTER-ISEP Research Unit in Porto.
The article proposes a unified framework to bound memory interference in multi-core platforms for a variety of different arbiters, such as time-division multiplexing (TDM), fixed priority, and an unspecified work-conserving arbiter. Our framework clearly demarcates the arbiter-dependent and independent stages in the analysis of interference. The arbiter-dependent phase takes the arbiter and the task memory-traffic pattern as inputs and produces a model of the availability of the bus to a given task. Then, based on the availability of the bus, the arbiter-independent phase determines the worst-case request-release scenario that maximizes the interference experienced by the tasks due to memory contention. We experimentally evaluate the quality of the analysis by comparison with a state-of-the-art TDM analysis approach and consistently showing a considerable reduction in maximum interference.
IEEE Senior Membership Awarded
I was just notified that my application for Senior Membership in the IEEE was granted and that I have been elevated to Senior Member. The notification states that “IEEE Senior Membership is an honor bestowed only to those who have made significant contributions to the profession“, which is comforting appreciation of my work. I want to thank the IEEE Senior Members and Fellows that supported my application by giving their recommendations.
Two Articles Appeared in Journal of Systems Architecture
Two articles that were submitted to a Journal of Systems Architecture Special Issue on High-performance and Real-time Embedded Systems have now appeared online. The first article is called “T-CREST: Time-predictable Multi-Core Architecture for Embedded Systems” and summarizes the work done in the recently concluded FP7 STREP project T-CREST, where me and my students worked on time-predictable memory controllers.
The second article is entitled “Dataflow Formalisation of Real-Time Streaming Applications on a Composable and Predictable Multi-Processor SOC” and shows how data-flow graphs can be used to model streaming applications mapped to the CompSoc platform and predict its minimum throughput. The basic idea is to start from a data-flow graph of the application and add additional nodes and edges that capture the mapping and timing behavior of all hardware components software libraries, and schedulers in the system. The approach is verified by comparing the predicted performance to the actual performance of an application executing on a CompSoc instance on an FPGA. The article clearly demonstrates the potential of modeling systems in which the behavior of all hardware and software components are known.
Invited Presentation at CMAS 2015
I have recently accepted an invitation to speak at the First TCRTS Workshop on Certifiable Multicore Avionics Systems (CMAS), which takes place on April 13 and is co-located with RTAS 2015 in Seattle. The presentation is made in collaboration with Jan Nowotsch at Airbus Group Innovations, where I was a Visiting Researcher during two months last year. The title of the presentation is Towards Certifiable Resource Sharing in Safety-Critical Multi-Core Real-Time Systems and discusses current problems and state-of-the-art methods for resource sharing in real-time multi-core platforms. The abstract of the presentation is found below:
The proliferation of multi-core platforms has had great impact on embedded computing. Multiple cores exploiting task-level parallelism offer performance far beyond what is possible with a single core, while staying within an acceptable power envelope. Since resources, such as interconnect and memories, are often shared between cores, the platforms have also become increasingly cost efficient. However, resource sharing results in interference between concurrently executing applications, which causes problems in real-time systems where such interference must be either bounded or completely eliminated. As a result, safety-critical systems, for example in the avionics domain, have not yet been able to capitalize on the benefits of multi-core platforms due to stringent certification requirements.
This presentation discusses the state-of-the-art in resource sharing in multi-core systems and its application to safety-critical real-time systems. First, a survey of efforts to build time-predictable resources, such as interconnects and memory controllers, is provided. Then, software-based interference mitigation mechanisms and analyses for these resources in commercial-of-the-shelf platforms are discussed. This is followed by an overview of the approach proposed by Airbus Group Innovations to manage interference and compute worst-case execution times of applications running on a Freescale P4080 multi-core platform. The presentation is concluded by highlighting open issues and future directions towards certifiable resource sharing in safety-critical multi-core real-time systems.
Update: The slides are available here.
Paper Accepted at RTAS 2015
We just had a paper accepted at the Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS) in Seattle. The paper is entitled “An Efficient Configuration Methodology for Time-Division Multiplexed Single Resources” and presents an ILP-based methodology to allocate TDM slots to resource clients, such that bandwidth and latency constraints are satisfied while resource utilization is minimized. A heuristic algorithm is furthermore proposed to determine the number of TDM slots in the schedule. This paper is a collaboration both with colleagues here at CTU Prague and with Andrew Nelson from Eindhoven University of Technology.
For the camera-ready version of the paper, please click here.
Back in Prague
I am now back from my two month research visit at Airbus Group Innovations. During my stay, I primarily worked on two things:
- Performance analysis of memory accesses in two COTS multi-core platforms. My work extended existing analysis to include the configuration of the memory controller. In particular, the existing setup was improved to enable evaluation of rank-level parallelism within a memory controller, channel parallelism between memory controllers, and different mapping options of cores to memory channels.
- I familiarized myself with the certification process for the avionics domain by reading and discussing key standardization documents, e.g. DO-178C for software certification, DO-254 for hardware certification, and DO-297 for integrated modular avionics. I also read several position papers from the Certification Authorities Software Team, most importantly about partitioning guidelines and certification of dual-core platforms. Lastly, I read the ARINC 653 standard, which details the application interface commonly used in avionics systems.
Thanks to Jan Nowotsch and Stefan Schneele for making the visit possible and to my office mates for providing a fun environment to work and learn in.
Paper Accepted at PDP 2015
Today, we congratulate Hazem Ali for having a paper accepted at PDP 2015. The paper is entitled “Generalized Extraction of Real-Time Parameters for Homogeneous Synchronous Dataflow Graphs” and proposes a heuristic methodology for extracting real-time parameters, such as periods, deadlines and offsets, for applications specified as homogeneous synchronous data-flow (HSDF) graphs. The benefit of the approach is that it enables HSDF applications to be analyzed using traditional real-time techniques and scheduled with common real-time schedulers, such as earliest-deadline first.