PaRTAA: A Real-time Multiprocessor for Mixed-Criticality Airborne Systems

TL;DR

PaRTAA introduces a partitioned real-time asymmetric architecture tailored for mixed-criticality airborne systems, balancing resource efficiency and task isolation through hardware partitioning within processing elements.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel hardware architecture that enhances resource utilization and isolation in mixed-criticality airborne systems by combining partitioned processing elements with asymmetric design.

Findings

Efficient resource sharing among dependent tasks.

Robust isolation between tasks of different criticality.

Improved scalability over traditional architectures.

Abstract

Mixed-criticality systems, where multiple systems with varying criticality-levels share a single hardware platform, require isolation between tasks with different criticality-levels. Isolation can be achieved with software-based solutions or can be enforced by a hardware level partitioning. An asymmetric multiprocessor architecture offers hardware-based isolation at the cost of underutilized hardware resources, and the inter-core communication mechanism is often a single point of failure in such architectures. In contrast, a partitioned uniprocessor offers efficient resource utilization at the cost of limited scalability. We propose a partitioned real-time asymmetric architecture (PaRTAA) specifically designed for mixed-criticality airborne systems, featuring robust partitioning within processing elements for establishing isolation between tasks with varying criticality. The granularity in the processing element offers efficient resource utilization where inter-dependent tasks share the same processing element for sequential execution while preserving isolation, and independent tasks simultaneously execute on different processing elements as per system requirements.