Design and Analysis of Multi-Core Software

We propose a comprehensive software tool called ModelTime(TM)for the design, analysis and construction of multi-core software for distributed real-time systems using a model-based design methodology. ModelTime will use UML-like diagrams to capture networked multi-core platforms, software components and configurations, functional and para-functional attributes like end-to-end timing constraints, as well as task dependencies and potential parallelism. Timing analysis will be carried out based on user-specified parameters such as priorities, periods and deadlines. Customizable attribute-value pairs will enable the easy addition of any necessary parameters to characterize hardware and/or software diagrams. Both automatic and manual deployment of software components to individual cores can be performed. Good packing approaches with analyzable properties will be proposed. Different approaches for synchronization across different cores to access shared resources will be studied. Multiple multi-core deployment and scheduling approaches will be supported. Automatic code generation techniques will be applied. Support for POSIX-compliant and other target platforms will be provided. Simulated and actual execution traces can be compared. Augmentation to SysML attributes for adequate modeling of multi-core real-time systems will be studied. XML representations for model interchanges will also be considered. The environment will serve as a comprehensive tool for the design, analysis and coding of software for distributed real-time systems using multi-core processors.