Surrogate Applications for Early Design Stage Multicore Contention Modeling

Properly allocating time budgets to applications during system's early design phases (EDP) prevents costly-to-handle time overruns in late design phases (LDP). Applications running in a multicore affect each other's behavior, which complicates reaching this goal. Further, in multi-provider software developments, software providers are reluctant to share their applications for IP reasons. Both factors prevent deriving tight bounds until LDP when applications are actually integrated. In this paper we propose a modeling approach, which we tailor for a processor in the space domain, that simplifies time budgeting in EDP by developing surrogate applications (SurApps) and an automatic framework to generate them. A SurApp copies the non-functional behavior of a given target application automatically. Each software provider generates, for an application AppA, a surrogate application SurAppA and gives it to other providers without the risk of revealing any IP. By running their applications against the SurAppA, other providers obtain a tight estimate of the slowdown their applications will suffer when run against AppA.