Assessing the suitability of the ngmp multi-core processor

Multi-core processors are increasingly being considered as a means to provide the performance required by future safety-critical embedded systems. In this line, Aeroflex Gaisler has developed, in conjunction with the European Space Agency, the NGMP, a quad-core processor to be used in the future space missions of the Agency. Unfortunately, the use of multi-core processors in industrial domains is not straight-forward since it poses various challenges on the timing be-havior of the system. This is mainly due to the interferences tasks suffer when accessing hardware shared resources and which can affect their WCET. Although the effect of inter-task interferences in multi-core shared resources on real-time applications has received attention from academia, most of the solutions proposed require hardware changes. The lack of quantitative studies of the slowdown on applications ’ per-formance caused by inter-task interferences on real COTS multi-core processors, limit their use by industry. As a first step to understand the effect of inter-task in-terference in real COTS processors, this paper evaluates the timing predictability properties of the NGMP. In particu-lar, we measure the maximum variation on tasks ’ execu-tion time due to inter-task interferences accessing NGMP’s shared hardware resources. To that end, we use a set of spe-cialized micro-benchmarks designed to stress specific proces-sor shared resources. The results of this can be useful for developing interference-aware WCET estimation method-ologies and scheduling algorithms for real-time applications running on embedded multi-core processors. 1