P-SOCRATES: FP7 European Project led by CISTER/INESC-TEC Just Started

P-SOCRATES (Parallel SOftware framework for time-CRitical mAny-core sysTEmS) is an FP7 funded project aiming to develop new techniques for exploiting the massively parallel computation capabilities of next-generation many-core embedded platforms in a predictable way. These platforms are well positioned for intercepting the increasingly convergence of High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Embedded Computing (EC) domains need for predictable high-performance, allowing HPC and EC applications to be executed on efficient and powerful heterogeneous architectures integrating general-purpose processors with many-core computing fabrics.

P-SOCRATES will tackle this important challenge by merging leading research groups from the HPC and EC communities. The time-criticality and parallelization challenges common to both areas will be addressed by proposing an integrated framework for executing workload-intensive applications with real-time requirements on top of next-generation commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) platforms based on many-core accelerated architectures. The project will investigate new HPC techniques that fulfil real-time requirements. The main sources of indeterminism will be identified, proposing efficient mapping and scheduling algorithms, along with the associated timing and schedulability analysis, to guarantee the real-time and performance requirements of the applications.

The project partners include as research institutions, besides ISEP, the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (Spain), the University of Modena (Italy) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (Switzerland). The industrial partners of the project include ATOS (Spain) and the SMEs Evidence (Italy) and Active Technologies (Italy). The project partners are supported by an industrial advisory board, which includes well-known multi-national companies including STMicroelectronics, IBM, Honeywell and Airbus.

Besides overall coordination and technical management, CISTER will be also deeply involved in the parallelism to real-time activity, leading in particular the Timing and Schedulability analysis work package.
The project started this October with the kick-off meeting taking place October 21-23 in Barcelona, Spain. The first two days were dedicated to discuss the technical advancements of the project, being the third day dedicated to a meeting of the project partners with the Industrial Advisory Board. The CISTER team at the meeting was integrated by Luis Miguel Pinho (Project Coordinator), Vincent Nélis, Patrick Yomsi and José Carlos Fonseca.

P-SOCRATES is a project in the scope of the call 10 of the FP7 program, under the Information objective “Advanced Computing Embedded and Control Systems”. The project will run for 3 years (until September 2016) with a total budget of 3.6 M€, being 2.76 M€ the EU contribution.

More information at: http://www.p-socrates.eu