P-SOCRATES: A Parallel Software Framework for Time-Critical Many-Core Systems

The advent of next-generation many-core embedded platforms has the chance of intercepting a converging need for predictable high-performance coming from both the High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Embedded Computing (EC) domains. On one side, new kinds of HPC applications are being required by markets needing huge amounts of information to be processed within a bounded amount of time. On the other side, EC systems are increasingly concerned with providing higher performance in real-time, challenging the performance capabilities of current architectures. This converging demand, however, raises the problem about how to guarantee timing requirements in presence of parallel execution. This paper presents the approach of project P-SOCRATES for the design of an integrated framework for the execution of workload-intensive applications with real-time requirements on top of next-generation commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) platforms based on many-core accelerated architectures. The time-criticality and parallelisation challenges are addressed by merging techniques coming from both HPC and EC domains, identifying the main sources of indeterminism and proposing efficient mapping and scheduling algorithms, along with the associated timing and schedulability analysis, to guarantee the real-time and performance requirements of the applications.