On the tailoring of CAST-32A certification guidance to real COTS multicore architectures

The use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) multicores in real-time industry is on the rise due to multicores' potential performance increase and energy reduction. Yet, the unpredictable impact on timing of contention in shared hardware resources challenges certification. Furthermore, most safety certification standards target single-core architectures and do not provide explicit guidance for multicore processors. Recently, however, CAST-32A has been presented providing guidance for software planning, development and verification in multicores. In this paper, from a theoretical level, we provide a detailed review of CAST-32A objectives and the difficulty of reaching them under current COTS multicore design trends; at experimental level, we assess the difficulties of the application of CAST-32A to a real multicore processor, the NXP P4080.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under grant TIN2015-65316-P and the HiPEAC Network of Excellence. Jaume Abella has been partially supported by the MINECO under Ramon y Cajal grant RYC-2013-14717.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Sensitivity analysis on an AC600 aluminum skin component

New materials are been introduced on the car body in order to reduce weight and fulfil the international CO2 emission regulations. Among them, the application of aluminum alloys is increasing for skin panels. Even if these alloys are beneficial for the car design, the manufacturing of these components become more complex. In this regard, numerical simulations have become a necessary tool for die designers. There are multiple factors affecting the accuracy of these simulations e.g. hardening, anisotropy, lubrication, elastic behavior. Numerous studies have been conducted in the last years on high strength steels component stamping and on developing new anisotropic models for aluminum cup drawings. However, the impact of the correct modelling on the latest aluminums for the manufacturing of skin panels has been not yet analyzed. In this work, first, the new AC600 aluminum alloy of JLR-Novelis is characterized for anisotropy, kinematic hardening, friction coefficient, elastic behavior. Next, a sensitivity analysis is conducted on the simulation of a U channel(with drawbeads). Then, the numerical an experimental results are correlated in terms of springback and failure. Finally, some conclusions are drawn

Carbohydrate structure: : the rocky road to automation

With the introduction of intuitive graphical software, structural biologists who are not experts in crystallography are now able to build complete protein or nucleic acid models rapidly. In contrast, carbohydrates are in a wholly different situation: scant automation exists, with manual building attempts being sometimes toppled by incorrect dictionaries or refinement problems. Sugars are the most stereochemically complex family of biomolecules and, as pyranose rings, have clear conformational preferences. Despite this, all refinement programs may produce high-energy conformations at medium to low resolution, without any support from the electron density. This problem renders the affected structures unusable in glyco-chemical terms. Bringing structural glycobiology up to ‘protein standards’ will require a total overhaul of the methodology. Time is of the essence, as the community is steadily increasing the production rate of glycoproteins, and electron cryo-microscopy has just started to image them in precisely that resolution range where crystallographic methods falter most

Mitigating Software-Instrumentation Cache Effects in Measurement-Based Timing Analysis

Measurement-based timing analysis (MBTA) is often used to determine the timing behaviour of software programs embedded in safety-aware real-time systems deployed in various industrial domains including automotive and railway. MBTA methods rely on some form of instrumentation, either at hardware or software level, of the target program or fragments thereof to collect execution-time measurement data. A known drawback of software-level instrumentation is that instrumentation itself does affect the timing and functional behaviour of a program, resulting in the so-called probe effect: leaving the instrumentation code in the final executable can negatively affect average performance and could not be even admissible under stringent industrial qualification and certification standards; removing it before operation jeopardizes the results of timing analysis as the WCET estimates on the instrumented version of the program cannot be valid any more due, for example, to the timing effects incurred by different cache alignments. In this paper, we present a novel approach to mitigate the impact of instrumentation code on cache behaviour by reducing the instrumentation overhead while at the same time preserving and consolidating the results of timing analysis

Inoculation of Triatoma Virus (Dicistroviridae: Cripavirus) elicits a non-infective immune response in mice

Background: Dicistroviridae is a new family of small, non-enveloped, +ssRNA viruses pathogenic to both beneficial arthropods and insect pests. Little is known about the dicistrovirus replication mechanism or gene function, and any knowledge on these subjects comes mainly from comparisons with mammalian viruses from the Picornaviridae family. Due to its peculiar genome organization and characteristics of the per os viral transmission route, dicistroviruses make good candidates for use as biopesticides. Triatoma virus (TrV) is a pathogen of Triatoma infestans (Hemiptera: Reduviidae), one of the main vectors of the human trypanosomiasis disease called Chagas disease. TrV was postulated as a potential control agent against Chagas' vectors. Although there is no evidence that TrV nor other dicistroviruses replicate in species outside the Insecta class, the innocuousness of these viruses in humans and animals needs to be ascertained. Methods. In this study, RT-PCR and ELISA were used to detect the infectivity of this virus in Mus musculus BALB/c mice. Results: In this study we have observed that there is no significant difference in the ratio IgG2a/IgG1 in sera from animals inoculated with TrV when compared with non-inoculated animals or mice inoculated only with non-infective TrV protein capsids. Conclusions: We conclude that, under our experimental conditions, TrV is unable to replicate in mice. This study constitutes the first test to evaluate the infectivity of a dicistrovirus in a vertebrate animal model.Centro de Estudios Parasitológicos y de Vectore

EPC Enacted: Integration in an Industrial Toolbox and Use against a Railway Application

Measurement-based timing analysis approaches are increasingly making their way into several industrial domains on account of their good cost-benefit ratio. The trustworthiness of those methods, however, suffers from the limitation that their results are only valid for the particular paths and execution conditions that the user is able to explore with the available input vectors. It is generally not possible to guarantee that the collected measurements are fully representative of the worst-case timing behaviour. In the context of measurement-based probabilistic timing analysis, the Extended Path Coverage (EPC) approach has been recently proposed as a means to extend the representativeness of measurement observations, to obtain the same effect of full path coverage. At the time of its first publication, EPC had not reached an implementation maturity that could be trialled industrially. In this work we analyze the practical implications of using EPC with real-world applications, and discuss the challenges in integrating it in an industrial-quality toolchain. We show that we were able to meet EPC requirements and successfully evaluate the technique on a real Railway application, on top of a commercial toolchain and full execution stack.This work has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme [FP7/2007-2013] under grant agreement 611085 (PROXIMA, www.proxima-project.eu). This work has also been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under grant TIN2015-65316-P and the HiPEAC Network of Excellence. Jaume Abella has been partially supported by the MINECO under Ramon y Cajal postdoctoral fellowship number RYC-2013-14717. The authors are grateful to Antoine Colin from Rapita Ltd. for his precious support.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft