TORRENTS

Second working day on Dec. 12, 2011

Our second working day on time-oriented embedded systems was held on December 12, 2012 in Toulouse.

The workshop was colocated with the OPODIS conference. See the TORRENTS workshop page for further information (program, registration, ...)
New: see the videos of the talks.

Invited speakers:

• Stanley Bak (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• Madeleine Faugère and Sylvain Girbal (Thales)
• Christian Fidi (TTTech Computertechnik AG)
• Klaus Havelund (NASA/JPL Laboratory)

Stanley Bak (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

A Predictable Execution Model for COTS-based Real-Time Systems
Building safety-critical real-time systems out of inexpensive, non-real-time, COTS components is challenging. Although COTS components generally offer high performance, they can occasionally incur significant timing delays. To prevent this, we propose controlling the operating point of each shared resource to maintain it below its saturation limit. This is necessary because the low-level arbiters of these shared resources are not typically designed to provide real-time guarantees. In this work, we introduced a novel system execution model, the PRedictable Execution Model (PREM), which, in contrast to the standard COTS execution model, coschedules at a high level all active components in the system, such as CPU and I/O peripherals. To enforce predictable, system-wide execution, we argue that real-time embedded applications should be compiled according to a new set of rules dictated by PREM. To experimentally validate the proposed theory, we developed a COTS-based PREM testbed and modified the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure to produce PREM-compatible executables.

Stanley Bak is currently a senior-level PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He received the Founders Award of Excellence for his undergraduate research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in 2004, the Debra and Ira Cohen Graduate Fellowship from UIUC twice, in 2008 and 2009, and has since been awarded the Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation (SMART) Scholarship from 2009 to 2013. His main research interests include I/O scheduling with Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) systems, hybrid systems verification, real-time systems, and reconfigurable hardware.

Madeline Faugère and Sylvain Girbal (Thales)

Challenge of multi-cores for Avionic Systems
The avionics domain is both characterized by mixed critical systems and strong certification requirements on COTS systems. Today, existing avionic solutions rely on strong partitioning of mono-core applications leading to performance limitation due to over-margin and high certification costs. Modern multi/many core COTS solution provides at first glance very attractive feature like huge average computing performance and reduced power consumption, but have proven to be much more difficult to use in a time and safety critical context where worst-cases have to be certified.
In addition to well handled software interactions on shared software data, the increasing complexity of shared hardware resources such as the memory hierarchy and the network on chip strongly impacts the predictability of hardware level interferences, reducing our ability to compute an efficient WCET.
The limitation of silicon technology also introduced some mechanism (ECC) ensuring a correct behavior on unreliable hardware. Those mechanism are based on replay techniques when an error is detected, and therefore impacts the overall performance.
The challenge we face today is therefore to quantify not only a correct but also deterministic and reliable behavior on an undeterministic and unreliable hardware. In this talk, we will present you the currently studied approach Thales TRT is involved in to harness those issues.

Christian Fidi (TTTech Computertechnik AG)

Modular and Scalable Deterministic Ethernet Solutions
Ethernet is the dominant network standard for local area networks (LAN). While originally designed for classic office applications, the growing communication demands in real-time systems led to adapting Ethernet for time-critical applications. Today, we can find Ethernet variants everywhere: in industrial applications (EtherCat, Ethernet Powerlink, ProiNet, Ethernet IP), in aerospace applications (ARINC 664-p7), in military naval applications (Gigabit Ethernet Data Multiplex System), in consumer audio/video systems (AVB), as well as in datacenters and cloud computing (DCB). All of these Ethernet variants aim to achieve a certain degree of Quality of Service (QoS) such that end-to-end transmission guarantees can be ensured. In this multitude of Ethernetvariants, TTEthernet introduces the deterministic time-triggered communication paradigm in an Ethernet avor, which allows the use of standard Ethernet in safety-critical systems and systems with applications of mixed-criticality.

Christian Fidi - Project Manager for Business Unit Aerospace, Defense and Railway / TTTech Computertechnik AG. Christian Fidi received his master degree from the University of Applied Science Technikum Vienna. Initially, he worked as a project engineer for the market leader in healthcare technologies for four years. Mr Fidi gained significant experience in project management and system software engineering as well as for certification in the medical industrial domain. At TTTech he continued working as a project manager and technical senior expert for TTTech's major product lines TTEhernet and TTP with focus on safety critical data communication and control systems in aerospace, land defense and railway applications since several years.

Klaus Havelund (NASA/JPL Laboratory)

Implementing Runtime Monitors