Multi-core devices for safety-critical systems: a survey

Multi-core devices are envisioned to support the development of next-generation safety-critical systems, enabling the on-chip integration of functions of different criticality. This integration provides multiple system-level potential benefits such as cost, size, power, and weight reduction. However, safety certification becomes a challenge and several fundamental safety technical requirements must be addressed, such as temporal and spatial independence, reliability, and diagnostic coverage. This survey provides a categorization and overview at different device abstraction levels (nanoscale, component, and device) of selected key research contributions that support the compliance with these fundamental safety requirements.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under grant TIN2015-65316-P, Basque Government under grant KK-2019-00035 and the HiPEAC Network of Excellence. The Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness has also partially supported Jaume Abella under Ramon y Cajal postdoctoral fellowship (RYC-2013-14717).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

SELENE: Self-Monitored Dependable Platform for High-Performance Safety-Critical Systems.

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[Otros] xisting HW/SW platforms for safety-critical systems suffer from limited performance and/or from lack of flexibility due to building on specific proprietary components. This jeopardizes their wide deployment across domains. While some research has been done to overcome these limitations, they have had limited success owing to missing flexibility and extensibility. Flexibility and extensibility are the cornerstones of industry adoption: industries dealing in capital goods need technologies on which they can rely on during decades (e.g. avionics, space, automotive). SELENE aims at covering this gap by proposing a new family of safety-critical computing platforms, which builds upon open source components such as the RISC-V instruction set architecture, GNU/Linux, and the Jailhouse hypervisor. SELENE will develop an advanced computing platform that is able to: (1) adapt the system to the specific requirements of different application domains, to changing environmental conditions, and to internal conditions of the system itself; (2) allow the integration of applications of different criticalities and performance demands in the same platform, guaranteeing functional and temporal isolation properties; (3) achieve flexible diverse redundancy by exploiting the inherent redundant capabilities of the multicore; and (4) efficiently execute compute-intensive applications by means of specific accelerators.This work has received funding from the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 871467.Hernández Luz, C.; Flich Cardo, J.; Paredes Palacios, R.; Lefebvre, C.; Allende, I.; Abella, J.; Trilla, D.... (2020). SELENE: Self-Monitored Dependable Platform for High-Performance Safety-Critical Systems. IEEE. 370-377. https://doi.org/10.1109/DSD51259.2020.00066S37037

Statistische Pfadabdeckung für nicht-deterministische, komplexe und sicherheitsrelevante Softwaretests

Emerging technologies in the embedded domain enable the development of innovative software-driven solutions. Autonomous systems are a clear example of this trend and have attracted considerable attention from different industrial sectors and research fields. In fact, they can be considered game-changers for several domains, even for the functional safety domain. These innovative safety-related systems are characterized by an increasing software complexity and high-performance requirements. Hence, a desirable requirement is to deploy an Operating System (OS), such as Linux, on these next-generation complex safety-related systems to fully take advantage of its benefits (e.g., security, reliability, software updates, performance). However, implementing a software layer, such as the Linux kernel, on a resource-sharing architecture hinders the verification process so that it is no longer feasible to base it on traditional approaches, most notably on testing. The potential of traditional testing lies in achieving exhaustive coverage, which is extremely difficult (if even feasible) in the systems with the complexity of those being developed today. Therefore, we believe that testing of software elements needs to be combined with analysis to pave the way towards safety assurance. This thesis contributes with a novel statistical analysis technique to quantify the execution path coverage of the Linux kernel and for estimating the risk entailed by untested execution paths. In the first part, the main gaps in the field of test coverage are examined, specially focused on the Linux kernel. Afterward, different research activities are conducted to statistically estimate the test coverage by the analysis of the execution paths traversed during the testing campaign. The inherent non-determinism of the Linux kernel and the viability of estimating the coverage with different methods is further demonstrated. An additional statistical method to calculate the execution probability of untested paths and determine the risk they entail is proposed. Finally, a technique that combines all these contributions in order to quantify the testing process and the risk associated with the uncovered paths. With the above contributions, this thesis proposes moving towards a statistical approach to quantify the coverage and the risk, and bridge the gap towards the certification of safety-related complex applications based on Linux or other complex OS that run on Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) multi-core devices

Towards functional safety compliance of matrix–matrix multiplication for machine learning-based autonomous systems

Autonomous systems execute complex tasks to perceive the environment and take self-aware decisions with limited human interaction. This autonomy is commonly achieved with the support of machine learning algorithms. The nature of these algorithms, that need to process large data volumes, poses high-performance demands on the underlying hardware. As a result, the embedded critical real-time domain is adopting increasingly powerful processors that combine multi-core processors with accelerators such as GPUs. The resulting hardware and software complexity makes it difficult to demonstrate that the system will run safely and reliably. This is the main objective of functional safety standards, such as IEC 61508 or ISO 26262, that deal with the avoidance, detection and control of hardware or software errors. In this paper, we adopt those measures for the safe inference of machine learning libraries on multi-core devices, two topics that are not explicitly covered in the current version of standards. To this end, we adapt the matrix-matrix multiplication function, a central element of existing machine learning libraries, according to the recommendations of functional safety standards. The paper makes the following contributions: (i) adoption of recommended programming practices for the avoidance of programming errors in the matrix-matrix multiplication, (ii) inclusion of diagnostic mechanisms based on widely used checksums to control runtime errors, and (iii) evaluation of the impact of previous measures in terms of performance and a quantification of the achieved diagnostic coverage. For this purpose, we implement the diagnostic mechanisms on one of the ARM R5 cores of a Zynq UltraScale+ multi-processor system-on-chip and we then adapt them to an Intel i7 processor with native code employing vectorization for the sake of performance.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Basque Cooperativism

Cooperative companies form part of the social economy—a third economic sector beyond the private and public spheres that embraces community, voluntary, and nonprofit activities. While corporations distribute their surpluses in relation to the capital contributions of shareholders, cooperatives do so according to activity of their members; in short, in a cooperative, capital is subordinate to work. The cooperative spirit has been an important feature of Basque society, from the traditional auzolan (literally, "neighborhood work") to the development of major cooperative companies like Alfa, Fagor and ultimately Mondragon, the largest cooperative in the world and a major supplier of products and services nationally and internationally. This book focuses on the changes and challenges faced by the social economy in general and Basque cooperatives in particular in light of the crisis of the welfare state, the growth of neoliberal doctrines and greater privatization, and most recently of all, the global financial crisis. The book is divided into three parts: Part 1 analyzes the origins, values, and culture of Basque cooperativism. Part 2 focuses on innovation in and the management system of Basque cooperatives as a source of competitive advantage vis-à-vis traditional corporations. Finally, part 3 addresses the response of Basque cooperatives to globalization in general and the current global financial crisis in particular.This book was published with generous financial support from the Basque Government.Introduction: Baleren Bakaikoa Azurmendi and Eneka Albizu ? 1. The Spirituality of Economics: Historical Roots of Mondragon, 1940-1974 by Fernando Molina ? 2. Culture and Social Representations of Work among Basques: Implications for Organizational Commitment and Cooperative Attitudes by Javier Cerrato Allende ? 3. Developing Intercooperation in the Social Economy: An Analysis of Grant Recipients in the Basque Country by Jon Morandeira Arca, Baleren Bakaikoa Azurmendi, and Victoria de Elizagarate Gutierrez ? 4. Accounting Reform: The Case of Workers' Self-Managed Cooperatives by Miguel Ángel Zubiaurre Artola ? 5. Is Innovation Better Managed by Corporations than Social Economy Companies? A Comparative Study of Innovative Basque Companies by Sara Fernández de Bobadilla Güemez and Eva Velasco Balmaseda ? 6. Innovation in the Basque Country: An Examination of the Cooperative Situation by Antón Borja Alvarez ? 7. Sources of Competitive Advantage in the Mondragon Cooperative Group by Imanol Basterretxea Markaida ? 8. Basque Cooperatives and the Crisis: The Case of Mondragon by Itziar Villafañez Pérez ? 9. Characteristics of Human Resource Management in Basque Cooperatives and Their Response to New International Contexts by Aitziber Lertxundi ? 10. Globalization and Knowledge Management in the Industrial Cooperatives of the Mondragon Corporation by Antxon Mendizábal ? Index ? List of Contributor