Speaker
Mr
Claudio Silva
(GMV Portugal)
Description
Activity: GSTP AO
ESA TO: Mr. Martin Hiller - Software Systems Division
Multi-core technologies are a natural trend towards fulfilling recent space applications requirements. This transition to multi-core is being driven by the growing demand for more autonomous missions and greater system integration.
However, for embedded real-time systems to profit from the additional computation power introduced by multiprocessor and multi-core architectures, another paradigmatic change is required. This time, in the way the software is developed and integrated. Time-critical tasks need to be redesigned to account for parallel flows of execution and therefore allow the mapping of such flows through the set of processors. Furthermore, new classes of software failures are bound to appear and move from a mere theoretical possibility to actual systems crashes.
To enable the use of multi-core technologies in the safety critical domain, guarantees against such failures must be introduced. Time and Space Partitioning is a promising solution to bridge the gap between safety critical application and multi-core technologies.
In MultIMA, we identify and address the challenges and opportunities met when using multi-core technologies to support safety critical real-time applications. This assessment is used as an input for the design of the multicore versions of the AIR ARINC 653 operating system and of the SIMA ARINC 653 simulator. Finally, the challenges faced during the implementation of these multi-core versions are presented.
