Dynamic Process Relocation in Multiprocessor Systems : Mixed-Criticality Aware Implementation

Sammanfattning: Enabling deterministic dynamic process relocation in electronic systems creates opportunities for dynamic computational load balancing, fault tolerance, power consumption management, which can be positively correlated with improvements in longevity, safety and energy-efficiency. Additionally, dynamic process relocation can be leveraged to enhance the adaptability of mixed-critical systems operating in open and changeable environments, which is a current market driver for safety-concerned industries like avionics, automotive and railways. Future electronic systems in such industries are envisioned to comprise networked heterogeneous multiprocessor chips that execute applications with different criticality levels. With such setting, it is not clear from the literature how dynamic process relocation (DPR) can be implemented in a way that does not compromise predictability concerns of safety-critical functionalities in such mixed-critical system. In this work, a design and implementation framework is demonstrated that takes a list of inputs that satisfy DPR design constraints and exploits DPR design primitives, protocol and design flow to produce the required implementation. The design inputs include application communication graph, application to platform mapping, process criticality levels and DPR scenarios. The implementation is demonstrated on a system of two printed circuit boards, each containing monolithic heterogeneous dual-core ARM cortex A9 processor networked with Microblaze soft-processors via a mesh-topology time-triggered Nostrum network-on-chip (NoC). The work shows promising predictable adaptability suitable for mixed-critical systems and could lead to improved service efficiency and availability.