Designing Applications with Predictable Runtime Characteristics for the Baremetal Intel SCC

Devendra Rai, Lars Schor, Nikolay Stoimenov, Iuliana Bacivarov, Lothar Thiele

Abstract: Thus far, most of the research into many- core computation has focussed on improving the average performance of an application, such as the average throughput. However, applications such as medical ultrasound not only require high throughput, but also require predictable performance characteristics, and are generally implemented on platforms explicitly designed for real-time computing. This paper proposes design strategies which enable high performance multiprocessing applications to achieve predictable communication latencies, computation times and reaction latencies over on-chip many-core platforms, such as the Intel SCC. The strategies presented in this paper can be incorporated into existing many core application design frameworks, wherein the responsibility of achieving predictable timing performance can be relegated to the framework itself. Experiments using two representative applications validate our strategies and show that it is indeed possible to use on-chip many core platforms for real time multiprocessing.