A Lightweight Spatio-Temporally Partitioned Multicore Architecture for Concurrent Execution of Safety Critical Workloads (2016-01-2067)

Modern aircraft systems employ numerous processors to achieve system functionality. In particular, engine controls and power distribution subsystems rely heavily on software to provide safetycritical functionality, and are expected to move toward multicore architectures. The computing hardware-layer of avionic systems must be able to execute many concurrent workloads under tight deterministic execution guarantees to meet the safety standards. Single-chip multicores are attractive for safety-critical embedded systems due to their lightweight form factor. However, multicores aggressively share hardware resources, leading to interference that in turn creates non-deterministic execution for multiple concurrent workloads. We propose an approach to remove on-chip interference via a set of methods to spatio-temporally partition shared multicore resources. Our proposed partitioning scheme is bounded within the worst case execution, and ensures efficient performance and deterministic execution.