CISTER/INESC TEC leads European project on predictable parallel programming in many-core processors
Assessing and maintaining the performance and predictability of many-core processors (with dozens of cores) is the purpose of project P-SOCRATES (Parallel SOftware framework for time-CRitical mAny-core sysTEmS), a European project led by the Research Centre in Real-Time and Embedded Computing Systems (CISTER), an associate unit of INESC TEC. The first stage of the project, which started in October 2013, is now over, and the project received a positive evaluation in the first review meeting, which took place on 15 May in Barcelona, Spain.
The first review meeting of the P-SOCRATES focused on the successful results obtained during the project’s first phase. The goal with this project is to allow current and future applications, with high requirements in terms of performance and real time, to benefit from the opportunities guaranteed by the most advanced many-core processors (a computational component with dozens of independent processing units, called “cores”, which read and execute instructions), assuring a predictable performance and maintaining, or even reducing, the costs of developing applications. The proposed approach will be validated in a broad spectrum of real applications: a module to process signals from sensors in space probes, a traffic controller for smart cities, and an online tool to perform a semantic analysis of texts in real time.
The CISTER team, composed of Luís Miguel Pinho (manager), Vincent Nelis, Patrick Yomsi and Eduardo Tovar, among others, is responsible for the project’s coordination and technical management, besides being in charge of the Work Package “Timing and Schedulability analysis”.
The P-SOCRATES gathers important research entities in High-Performance Computing and Embedded Computing: CISTER, the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (Spain), the University of Modena (Italy) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (Switzerland). The industrial partners include ATOS (Spain) and the SMEs Evidence and Active Technologies (both from Italy). The consortium is also supported by an industrial evaluation committee, which includes multinationals such as Airbus, IBM and Honeywell. The P-SOCRATES is a project of the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme, and it has a budget of over three million Euros.
The INESC TEC researchers mentioned in this article are associated with the following partner institutions: ISEP.
