Microbenchmarks speed up the adoption of complex hardware in critical real-time systems
Barcelona Supercomputing Center has launched a new spin-off, Maspatechnologies, that aims to provide multicore timing analysis solutions in accordance to safety standards for critical embedded systems, including automotive, aerospace and space industry. The main product offered by Maspatechnologies is a software component called micro-benchmark technology to be used for timing verification, validations and optimization of software developed for embedded real-time domains. Micro-benchmarks will significantly reduce the cost of end users to provide evidence about the correct timing behaviour of the applications on the target multicore.
The news spin-off will provide multicore support verification and validation tools and services that help critical real-time industries to adopt multicore- manycore- and accelerator-based platforms. In particular, Maspatechnologies tools simplify obtaining evidence for safety application in adherence to safety/certification guidelines in terms of timing. This includes CAST-32A in avionics and ISO 26262 safety standard in automotive.
The main invention element is a set of specialized user-level benchmarks that put a configurable, usually high, frequency access load on a target set of processor resources like caches, buses or memory. This so called microbenchmarks, are single-behaviour applications that constantly access the target resources. The invention also includes a set of scripts able to produce microbenchmarks automatically from a description of the target resource. For instance, for a cache the description includes parameters like its associativity, cache line size, and total size. Derived technologies from micro-benchmarks also include software multicore contention models, all with the goal of providing evidence of the correct timing behaviour of applications in multicore-based embedded systems
Microbenchmarks speed up the adoption of complex hardware in critical real-time systems. By running microbenchmarks against a reference application under analysis, one can get an accurate measure of the impact that resource contention may have on the application’s timing behaviour. Microbenchmarks also comprise a validation loop that works with Performance Monitoring Counters (PMCs) to provide evidence that they achieve their intended goal in stressing different processor resources.
More information at www.bsc.es
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