Increased performance at reduced costs while maintaining safety levels – these are the key demands from European avionic, automotive and automation industries. Even the latest state-of-the-art embedded single core processors cannot cope with these demands. The pursuit of higher performance, improved safety levels and lower costs requires a new solution. parMERASA combines the requirements for high-performance with timepredictable execution that is indispensable in our focused safety-critical domains. Hard real-time applications, such as flight management system, automotive engine and drilling machine control, will be parallelised and executed on an embedded multi-core processor. The parMERASA multi-core processor and system software is expected to scale up to 64 cores. Objectives include an at least eightfold improvement of the worst-case execution time for parallelised legacy applications in the avionics, automotive and construction machinery industries.
Technical Approach
The goal of our approach is to facilitate the use of multi-core processors in real-time systems. To meet this goal, the project must overcome the problems of existing timing analysis approaches, which only cover sequential program execution. The new scientific and technical innovations created specifically for the parMERASA project include:
- parallelisation techniques for safety-critical applications;
- timing analysable parallel design patterns;
- operating system virtualisation and efficient synchronisation mechanisms;
- guarantee of worst-case execution times (WCET) of parallelised applications;
- verification and profiling tools;
- timing analysable multi-core architecture with up to 64 cores.
A software engineering approach will be developed to ease sequential to parallel program transformation by developing and supporting suitable parallel design patterns that are analysable. Verification and profiling tools will be developed, and we aim to provide recommendations to enhance both automotive and avionics standards.