Multicores are today an opportunity to support the next generation of safety-critical systems such as the Flight Management Systems with 4D trajectories, the Sesar program (Next European Traffic Management Program) or Cockpit 3.0. Without appropriate usage restrictions those multicore architectures exhibit unpredictable behavior that makes them uncertifiable for safety-critical systems.
CERTAINTY has managed to facilitate the path towards certifiability by providing a set of hardware/software principles, techniques and methodologies mastering system determinism and predictability while ensuring isolation between tasks of different criticality during shared hardware resource accesses. These principles are DO 178C and DO 297 compliant and have been translated in recommendations sent to safety and certification organizations. Moreover, those principles optimize resource availability for further function upgrades and efficient integration. The associated tools cover the design stages from system specification to code generation. More specifically, static timing analysis (aiT), interference analysis, new scheduling techniques, optimized deployment on multicores, reliability-aware code generation for MPPA (KALRAY) for mixed criticality on networks have been developed.
Experiments on a real avionic function (Flight Management System) demonstrate 60 % performance increase on a 4 core architecture compared to single cores. The dual-critical scheduling methods on single cores significantly outperform the optimal fixed priority scheduling algorithm both in theory and in experiments.
Dr. Madeleine Faugere, Thales TRT, the CERTAINTY project coordinator says: “Our new NoC protocols ensure system robustness with very low overhead and our new design methodologies and accompanying tools dramatically simplify the timing verification of safety-critical applications. CERTAINTY’s results pave the way into a bright multicore avionic future.”
Furthermore, CERTAINTY drives the second generation of the MPPA processors towards time composability.
Last changed: Dec 01 2014 at 10:38 PM
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 288175
DR. Madeleine FAUGÈRE
THALES S.A.