The shift to multicores in real-time and safety-critical systems

In real-time and safety-critical systems, the move towards multicores is becoming unavoidable in order to keep pace with the increasing required processing power and to meet the high integration trend while maintaining a reasonable power consumption. However, standard multicore systems are mainly designed to increase average performance, whereas embedded systems have additional requirements with respect to safety, reliability and realtime behavior. Therefore, the shift to multicores raises several challenges the embedded community has to face. These challenges involve the design of certifiable multicore platforms, the management of shared resources and the development/integration of parallel software. These issues are encountered at different steps of system development, from modeling and design to software implementation and hardware deployment. Therefore, both multi-core/semiconductor manufacturers and the real-time community have to bridge the gap in order to meet the challenges imposed by multicores. The goal of this paper is to trigger such a discussion as an attempt to bridge the gap between the two worlds and to raise awareness about the hurdles and challenges that need to be tackled.