Paving the way for multi-cores in industrial hard real-time control applications

Abstract

The rise of multicore processors for industrial embedded control applications forces companies to face the challenge of replacing legacy single-core applications by multithreaded programs. We present a systematic and tool-supported approach starting with existing single-core code and transforming it into multi-threaded code such that timing analysis is preserved and eased. The approach is based on (a) scheduling periodic tasks onto multiple dedicated cores as well as (b) executing other code parts after a model-based parallelization, which introduces structured parallelism only, on the remaining cores. The main advantage of our approach compared to a re-implementation is a strongly reduced effort for implementation and testing because of the reuse of existing code. The approach is demonstrated and evaluated for the control code of a foundation crane; slack time is introduced as measurement for the effectiveness.

A Survey and Comparative Study of Hard and Soft Real-Time Dynamic Resource Allocation Strategies for Multi-/Many-Core Systems

“…The majority of works reported in the literature for hard real-time resource allocation assume the workloads to be known in advance, i.e., the allocation decisions by taking the timing constraints are computed at design-time [Han and Lin 1989;Saifullah et al 2011;Bonifaci et al 2013;Jahr et al 2014;de Matos Pedro et al 2015]. However, the main focus in this article has been on dynamic resource allocation that needs to compute allocations at run-time for dynamically arriving workloads.…”