Multicore Early Design Stage Guaranteed Performance Estimates for the Space Domain

Abstract

The ability to produce early guaranteed performance (worst-case execution time) estimates for multicores, i.e. before software from different providers gets integrated onto the same critical system, is pivotal. This helps reducing lately-detected costly-to-handle timing violations. An existing methodology creates ‘copy’ (surrogate) applications from the execution in isolation of each target application. Surrogate applications can be used to upperbound multicore contention delay, and hence WCET estimates in multicores. However, this methodology has only been shown to work on a simulation environment. In this paper we show the work we have carried out to adapt this technology to a real multicore processor for the space domain.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 postdoc fellowship RYC-2013-14717.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft