Contention in multicore hardware shared resources: Understanding of the state of the art

The real-time systems community has over the years devoted considerable attention to the impact on execution timing that arises from contention on access to hardware shared resources. The relevance of this problem has been accentuated with the arrival of multicore processors. From the state of the art on the subject, there appears to be considerable diversity in the understanding of the problem and in the “approach” to solve it. This sparseness makes it difficult for any reader to form a coherent picture of the problem and solution space. This paper draws a tentative taxonomy in which each known approach to the problem can be categorised based on its specific goals and assumptions.Postprint (published version

Improving time predictability of shared hardware resources in real-time multicore systems : emphasis on the space domain

Critical Real-Time Embedded Systems (CRTES) follow a verification and validation process on the timing and functional correctness. This process includes the timing analysis that provides Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) estimates to provide evidence that the execution time of the system, or parts of it, remain within the deadlines. A key design principle for CRTES is the incremental qualification, whereby each software component can be subject to verification and validation independently of any other component, with obvious benefits for cost. At timing level, this requires time composability, such that the timing behavior of a function is not affected by other functions. CRTES are experiencing an unprecedented growth with rising performance demands that have motivated the use of multicore architectures. Multicores can provide the performance required and bring the potential of integrating several software functions onto the same hardware. However, multicore contention in the access to shared hardware resources creates a dependence of the execution time of a task with the rest of the tasks running simultaneously. This dependence threatens time predictability and jeopardizes time composability. In this thesis we analyze and propose hardware solutions to be applied on current multicore designs for CRTES to improve time predictability and time composability, focusing on the on-chip bus and the memory controller. At hardware level, we propose new bus and memory controller designs that control and mitigate contention between different cores and allow to have time composability by design, also in the context of mixed-criticality systems. At analysis level, we propose contention prediction models that factor the impact of contenders and don¿t need modifications to the hardware. We also propose a set of Performance Monitoring Counters (PMC) that provide evidence about the contention. We give an special emphasis on the Space domain focusing on the Cobham Gaisler NGMP multicore processor, which is currently assessed by the European Space Agency for its future missions.Los Sistemas Críticos Empotrados de Tiempo Real (CRTES) siguen un proceso de verificación y validación para su correctitud funcional y temporal. Este proceso incluye el análisis temporal que proporciona estimaciones de el peor caso del tiempo de ejecución (WCET) para dar evidencia de que el tiempo de ejecución del sistema, o partes de él, permanecen dentro de los límites temporales. Un principio de diseño clave para los CRTES es la cualificación incremental, por la que cada componente de software puede ser verificado y validado independientemente del resto de componentes, con beneficios obvios para el coste. A nivel temporal, esto requiere composabilidad temporal, por la que el comportamiento temporal de una función no se ve afectado por otras funciones. CRTES están experimentando un crecimiento sin precedentes con crecientes demandas de rendimiento que han motivado el uso the arquitecturas multi-núcleo (multicore). Los procesadores multi-núcleo pueden proporcionar el rendimiento requerido y tienen el potencial de integrar varias funcionalidades software en el mismo hardware. A pesar de ello, la interferencia entre los diferentes núcleos que aparece en los recursos compartidos de os procesadores multi núcleo crea una dependencia del tiempo de ejecución de una tarea con el resto de tareas ejecutándose simultáneamente en el procesador. Esta dependencia amenaza la predictabilidad temporal y compromete la composabilidad temporal. En esta tésis analizamos y proponemos soluciones hardware para ser aplicadas en los diseños multi núcleo actuales para CRTES que mejoran la predictabilidad y composabilidad temporal, centrándose en el bus y el controlador de memoria internos al chip. A nivel de hardware, proponemos nuevos diseños de buses y controladores de memoria que controlan y mitigan la interferencia entre los diferentes núcleos y permiten tener composabilidad temporal por diseño, también en el contexto de sistemas de criticalidad mixta. A nivel de análisis, proponemos modelos de predicción de la interferencia que factorizan el impacto de los núcleos y no necesitan modificaciones hardware. También proponemos un conjunto de Contadores de Control del Rendimiento (PMC) que proporcionoan evidencia de la interferencia. En esta tésis, damós especial importancia al dominio espacial, centrándonos en el procesador mutli núcleo Cobham Gaisler NGMP, que está siendo actualmente evaluado por la Agencia Espacial Europea para sus futuras misiones

Schedulability Analysis for Certification-friendly Multicore Systems

This paper presents a new schedulability test for safety-critical software undergoing a transition from single-core to multicore systems - a challenge faced by multiple industries today. Our migration model, consisting of a schedulability test and execution model, is distinguished by three aspects consistent with reducing transition cost. First, it assumes externally-driven scheduling parameters, such as periods and deadlines, remain fixed (and thus known), whereas exact computation times are not. Second, it adopts a globally synchronized conflict-free I/O model that leads to a decoupling between cores, simplifying the schedulability analysis. Third, it employs global priority assignment across all tasks on each core, irrespective of application, where budget constraints on each application ensure isolation. These properties enable us to obtain a utilization bound that places an allowable limit on total task execution times. Evaluation results demonstrate the advantages of our scheduling model over competing resource partitioning approaches, such as Periodic Server and TDMA.Ope

A Survey of Timing Verification Techniques for Multi-Core Real-Time Systems

This survey provides an overview of the scientific literature on timing verification techniques for multi-core real-time systems. It reviews the key results in the field from its origins around 2006 to the latest research published up to the end of 2018. The survey highlights the key issues involved in providing guarantees of timing correctness for multi-core systems. A detailed review is provided covering four main categories: full integration, temporal isolation, integrating interference effects into schedulability analysis, and mapping and allocation. The survey concludes with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of these different approaches, identifying open issues, key challenges, and possible directions for future research

Memory Efficient Scheduling for Multicore Real-time Systems

Modern real-time systems are becoming increasingly complex and requiring significant computational power to meet their demands. Since the increase in uniprocessor speed has slowed down in the last decade, multicore processors are now the preferred way to supply the increased performance demand of real-time systems. A significant amount of work in the real-time community has focused on scheduling solutions for multicore processors for both sequential and parallel real-time tasks. Even though such solutions are able to provide strict timing guarantees on the overall response time of real-time tasks, they rely on the assumption that the worst-case execution time (WCET) of each individual task is known. However, physical shared resources such as main memory and I/O are heavily employed in multicore processors. These resources are limited and therefore subject to contention. In fact, the execution time of one task when run in parallel with other tasks is significantly larger than the execution time of the same task when run in isolation. In addition, the presence of shared resources increases the timing unpredictability due to the conflicts generated by multiple cores. As a result, the adoption of multicore processors for real-time systems is dependent upon solving such sources of unpredictability. In this dissertation, we investigate memory bus contention. In particular, two main problems are associated with memory contention: (1) unpredictable behavior and (2) hindrance of performance. We show how to mitigate these two problems through scheduling. Scheduling is an attractive tool that can be easily integrated into the system without the need for hardware modifications. We adopt an execution model that exposes memory as a resource to the scheduling algorithm. Thus, the theory of real-time multiprocessor scheduling, that has seen significant advances in recent years, can be utilized to schedule both processor cores and memory. Since the real-time workload on multicore processors can be modeled as sequential or parallel tasks, we also study parallel task scheduling by taking memory time into account

DuoMC: Tight DRAM Latency Bounds with Shared Banks and Near-COTS Performance

© {Reza Mirosanlou, Mohamed Hassan, and Rodolfo Pellizzoni | ACM} {2021}. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in {In The International Symposium on Memory Systems }, https://doi.org/10.1145/3488423.3488431DRAM memory controllers (MCs) in COTS systems are designed primarily for average performance, offering no worst-case guarantees, while real-time MCs provide timing guarantees at the cost of a significant average performance degradation. For this reason, hardware vendors have been reluctant to integrate real-time solutions in high-performance platforms. In this paper, we overcome this performance-predictability trade-off by introducing DuoMC, a novel memory controller that promotes to augment COTS MCs with a real-time scheduler and run-time monitoring to provide predictability guarantees. Leveraging the fact that the resource is barely overloaded, DuoMC allows the system to enjoy the high performance of the conventional MC most of the time, while switching to the real-time scheduler only when timing guarantees risk being violated, which rarely occurs. In addition, unlike most existing real-time MCs, DuoMC enables the utilization of both private and shared DRAM banks among cores to facilitate communication among tasks. We evaluate DuoMC using a cycle-accurate multi-core simulator. Results show that DuoMC can provide better or comparable latency guarantees than state-of-the-art real-time MCs with limited performance loss (only 8% in the worst scenario) compared to the COTS MC

Duetto: Latency Guarantees at Minimal Performance Cost

The management of shared hardware resources in multi-core platforms has been characterized by a fundamental trade-off: high-performance arbiters typically employed in COTS systems offer no worst-case guarantees, while dedicated real-time controllers provide timing guarantees at the cost of significantly degrading system performance. In this paper, we overcome this trade-off by introducing Duetto, a novel hardware resource management paradigm. Duetto pairs a real-time arbiter with a high-performance arbiter and a latency estimator module. Based on the observation that the resource is rarely overloaded, Duetto executes the high-performance arbiter most of the time, switching to the real-time arbiter only in the rare cases when the latency estimator deems that timing guarantees risk being violated. We demonstrate our approach on the case study of a multi-bank memory. Our evaluation based on cycle-accurate simulations shows that Duetto can provide the same latency guarantees as the real-time arbiter with limited loss of performance compared to the high-performance arbiter