Multicore Early Design Stage Guaranteed Performance Estimates for the Space Domain

Mikel Fernandez1, Gabriel Fernandez1,2, Jaume Abella1 and Francisco J. Cazorla1
1Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)
2Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya

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 latelydetected 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.



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