The variability of application execution times on a multi-core platform

16th International Workshop on Worst-Case Execution Time Analysis (WCET 2016). 5, Jul, 2016. Toulouse, France.WCET was held as part of ECRTS 2016 that took place in Toulouse, France on July 5-8, 2016.It is a known fact that processes running concurrently on different cores in a multicore environment interfere with each other on the processor shared resources. The contention on these shared resources considerably slows down the execution on every core since sometimes the cores must stall while their requests to access the resources are being served. But by how much the execution may b e s lowed down due to this interference? In this pap er we answer this question with numbers coming from experimentation. That is, we quantify the magnitude of the impact of the interference on the execution time by running programs taken from the TACLeBench benchmark suite, a popular benchmark suite in the real-time research community, on the first generation of Kalray manycore processor family, the MPPA-256 (the development board) that goes by the code name “Andey”.