Multicore enablement for Cyber Physical Systems

Abstract

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) design expands the horizon of traditional hardware/software systems engineering into the specifics of natural sciences such as physics or bio-chemistry. This is a new quality and inherent challenge of CPS since interdisciplinary skills, methods, tools and design flows, which originally werent even considered for mutual awareness, should now be linked, inter-work with each other and eventually be merged in order to achieve a holistic system co-optimization. At the same time, application domains in which CPS are playing increasingly important roles such as ecological electro-mobility, medical healthcare, ambient assisted living or all aspects around energy generation, distribution and control all can be characterized by vastly growing demands for compute performance. Multicore and manycore architectures, brought forward by all leading processor vendors, are the natural candidates for compute work (/race) horses within the cyber domain of CPS. However, the use of multicore processors in CPS requires levels of safety, security, real-time support and energy efficiency, which multicore processors for general purpose computing applications have typically not been designed for. In order to help reducing the complexity from the above described CPS inter-domain linkage challenges, this contribution to the Samos CPS special session discusses generic accelerators and hardware/software techniques that provide coverage for critical non-functional requirements of off-the-shelf multicore and MPSoC (Multi-Processor System on Chip) architectures. Our main focus is on suitable virtualization and self-organization techniques for CPS.