Javier Jalle

A Dual-Criticality Memory Controller (DCmc): Proposal and Evaluation of a Space Case Study

Multicore Dual-Criticality systems comprise two types of applications, each with a different criticality level. In the space domain these types are referred as payload and control applications, which have high-performance and real time requirements respectively. In order to control the interaction (contention) among payload and control applications in the access to the main memory, reaching the goals of high bandwidth for the former and guaranteed timing bounds for the latter, we propose a Dual-Criticality memory controller (DCmc). DCmc virtually divides memory banks into real-time and high-performance banks, deploying a different request scheduler policy to each bank type, which facilitates achieving both goals. Our evaluation with a multicore cycle-accurate simulator and a real space case study shows that DCmc enables deriving tight WCET estimates, regardless of the co-running payload applications, hence effectively isolating the effect of contention in the access to memory. DCmc also enables payload applications exploiting memory locality, which is needed for high performance.

Bus designs for time-probabilistic multicore processors

Probabilistic Timing Analysis (PTA) reduces the amount of information needed to provide tight WCET estimates in real-time systems with respect to classic timing analysis. PTA imposes new requirements on hardware design that have been shown implementable for single-core architectures. However, no support has been proposed for multicores so far. In this paper, we propose several probabilistically-analysable bus designs for multicore processors ranging from 4 cores connected with a single bus, to 16 cores deploying a hierarchical bus design. We derive analytical models of the probabilistic timing behaviour for the different bus designs, show their suitability for PTA and evaluate their hardware cost. Our results show that the proposed bus designs (i) fulfil PTA requirements, (ii) allow deriving WCET estimates with the same cost and complexity as in single-core processors, and (iii) provide higher guaranteed performance than single-core processors, 3.4x and 6.6x on average for an 8-core and a 16-core setup respectively.

Deconstructing bus access control policies for Real-Time multicores

Multicores may satisfy the growing performance requirements of critical Real-Time systems which has made industry to consider them for future real-time systems. In a multicore, the bus contention-control policy plays a key role in systems performance and the tightness of the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) estimates. In this paper we develop analytical models of the contention that requests from different tasks running in different cores suffer for the two most-used contention control policies: Time-Division Multiple Access (TDMA) and Interference-Aware Bus Arbiter (IABA), which allows us to compare them. We further show the benefits of having such models for real-time system designers and chip providers. Our results show that WCET estimates obtained with TDMA are slightly (2%) tighter than those obtained with IABA, at the cost of knowing the exact cycle at which every access of every task accesses the bus. However, average performance is 10% worse with TDMA than with IABA. Overall, IABA is the most appealing contention-control policy since it allows achieving tight WCET estimates and high average performance with little burden for the user.

Increasing confidence on measurement-based contention bounds for real-time round-robin buses

Contention among tasks concurrently running in a multicore has been deeply studied in the literature specially for on-chip buses. Most of the works so far focus on deriving exact upper-bounds to the longest delay it takes a bus request to be serviced (ubd), when its access is arbitrated using a time-predictable policy such as round-robin. Deriving ubd for a bus can be done accurately when enough timing information is available, which is not often the case for commercial-of-the-shelf (COTS) processors. Hence, ubd is approximated (ubdm) by directly experimenting on the target processor, i.e by measurements. However, using ubdm makes the timing analysis technique to resort on the accuracy of ubdm to derive trustworthy worst-case execution time estimates. Therefore, accurately estimating ubd by means of ubdm is of paramount importance. In this paper, we propose a systematic measurement-based methodology to accurately approximate ubd without knowing the bus latency or any other latency information, being only required that the underlying bus policy is round-robin. Our experimental results prove the robustness of the proposed methodology by testing it on different bus and processor setups.

Resource usage templates and signatures for COTS multicore processors

Upper bounding the execution time of tasks running on multi-core processors is a hard challenge. This is especially so with commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware that conceals its internal operation. The main difficulty stems from the contention effects on access to hardware shared resources (e.g, buses) which cause tasks timing behavior to depend on the load that co-runner tasks place on them. This dependence reduces time composability and constrains incremental verification. In this paper we introduce the concepts of resource-usage signatures and templates, to abstract the potential contention caused and incurred by tasks running on a multicore. We propose an approach that employs resource-usage signatures and templates to enable the analysis of individual tasks largely in isolation, with low integration costs, producing execution time estimates per task that are easily composable throughout the whole system integration process. We evaluate the proposal on a 4-core NGMP-like multicore architecture.

AHRB: A high-performance time-composable AMBA AHB bus

Hard real-time systems are moving toward complex systems comprising chips with different IP components connected with standard buses. AMBA is one of the most used bus interfaces and has already been included in processors in the real-time domain. However, AMBA was not designed to provide time composable Worst Case Execution Time (WCET) estimates, which are desirable to reduce timing validation and verification costs. This paper analyzes and extends the AMBA Advanced High-performance Bus (AHB) specification to enable time-composable WCET estimates by design. Concretely, (1) we analyze in detail the AMBA AHB in the context of hard real-time systems proving that it fails to provide time composability; (2) we define a restricted subset of AMBA AHB features, named restricted AHB (resAHB), that allows deriving time-composable, yet not tight, WCET estimates; and (3) we define an extension of resAHB, named Advanced High-performance Real-time Bus (AHRB), that includes the timing constraints in the specification. This allows deriving time-composable and tight WCET estimates. Our results show that AHRB can provide 3.5x tighter estimates than resAHB on average for EEMBC benchmarks.

Improving Early Design Stage Timing Modeling in Multicore Based Real-Time Systems

This paper presents a modelling approach for the timing behavior of real-time embedded systems (RTES) in early design phases. The model focuses on multicore processors - accepted as the next computing platform for RTES - and in particular it predicts the contention tasks suffer in the access to multicore on-chip shared resources. The model presents the key properties of not requiring the applications source code or binary and having high-accuracy and low overhead. The former is of paramount importance in those common scenarios in which several software suppliers work in parallel implementing different applications for a system integrator, subject to different intellectual property (IP) constraints. Our model helps reducing the risk of exceeding the assigned budgets for each application in late design stages and its associated costs.