The P-SOCRATES (Parallel SOftware framework for time-CRitical mAny-core sysTEmS) project first Review Meeting was successfully held on May 15, at the venue of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain. The review meeting was held within the block review week, organized by the Complex Systems & Advanced Computing Unit of the European Commission (CNECT A3) which brought together the “Advanced Computing project cluster”: the group of FP7 projects working in the area of Advanced Computing and financed by the European Commission under ICT Call 10.
The main objective of the block review was to analyze, measure and maximize the potential and actual impact of the projects in terms of exploitation. Each project went through an autonomous review meeting, with a common all-projects workshop on impact and exploitation held on Wednesday, May 14. The P-SOCRATES review meeting focused on the achievements in the first phase of the project, which led to the successful reaching of the project first milestone. The project exploitation views were also presented in the Wednesday workshop, in a session on real-time and reliability.
The P-SOCRATES project will research and 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 is tackling this important challenge by merging leading research groups from the HPC and EC communities. The time-criticality and parallelization challenges common to both areas are 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 is investigating new HPC techniques that fulfil real-time requirements: the main sources of indeterminism are identified, and efficient mapping and scheduling algorithms will be proposeded, 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 CISTER/INESC-TEC, 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 Airbus, IBM, and Honeywell.
Besides overall coordination and technical management, CISTER/INESC-TEC is also deeply involved in the parallelism to real-time activity, leading in particular the Timing and Schedulability analysis work package.
More information at: http://www.p-socrates.eu
