High-Performance Parallelisation of Real-Time Applications with the Upscale SDK

Demo in Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE 2017). 27 to 31, Mar, 2017, 6.8 HiPEAC: European Network on High Performance and Embedded Architecture and Compilation. Lausanne.Nowadays, the prevalence of computing systems in our lives is so ubiquitous that it would not be far-fetched to state that we live in a cyber-physical world dominated by computer systems. These systems demand for more and more computational performance to process large amounts of data from multiple data sources, some of them with guaranteed processing response times. In other words, systems are required to deliver their results within pre-defined (and sometimes extremely short) time bounds. Examples can be found for instance in intelligent transportation systems for fuel consumption reduction in cities or railway, or autonomous driving of vehicles. To cope with such performance requirements, chip designers produced chips with dozens or hundreds of cores, interconnected with complex networks on chip. Unfortunately, the parallelization of the computing activities brings many challenges, among which how to provide timing guarantees, as the timing behaviour of the system running within a many-core processor depends on interactions on shared resources that are most of the time not know by the system designer. P-SOCRATES (Parallel Software Framework for Time-Critical Many-core Systems) is an FP7 European project, which developed a novel methodology to facilitate the deployment of standardized parallel architectures for real-time applications. This methodology was implemented (based on existent models and components) to provide an integrated software development kit, the UpScale SDK, to fully exploit the huge performance opportunities brought by the most advanced many-core processors, whilst ensuring a predictable performance and maintaining (or even reducing) development costs of applications. The presentation will provide an overview of the UpScale SDK, its underlying methodology, and the results of its application on relevant industrial use-cases.