ODRE Workshop: Probabilistic Dynamic Hard Real-Time Scheduling in HPC

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel orchestration tool that manages containerized industrial control applications on shared resources, maintaining real-time determinism in distributed HPC environments, validated through initial experiments.

Contribution

It presents a new orchestration approach enabling real-time industrial control in distributed HPC systems using off-the-shelf virtualization technology.

Findings

Resource sharing can be managed without losing real-time guarantees.

The approach is viable for industrial control applications.

Performance limits and application scope are identified.

Abstract

Industry 4.0 is changing fundamentally the way data is collected, stored and analyzed in industrial processes. While this change enables novel application such as flexible manufacturing of highly customized products, the real-time control of these processes, however, has not yet realized its full potential. We believe that modern virtualization techniques, specifically application containers, present a unique opportunity to decouple control functionality from associated hardware. Through it, we can fully realize the potential for highly distributed and transferable industrial processes even with real-time constraints arising from time-critical sub-processes. In this paper, we present a specifically developed orchestration tool to manage the challenges and opportunities of shifting industrial control software from dedicated hardware to bare-metal servers or (edge) cloud computing platforms. Using off-the-shelf technology, the proposed tool can manage the execution of containerized applications on shared resources without compromising hard real-time execution determinism. Through first experimental results, we confirm the viability and analyzed the behavior of resource shared systems with strict real-time requirements. We then describe experiments set out to deliver expected results and gather performance, application scope and limits of the presented approach.