Auditorium (Building IMAG)
22 February 2019 - 13h30
Implementing a Real-time Avionic application on a Manycore Processor (Phd Defense)
by Moustapha Lo from Verimag
Abstract: Traditional single-cores are no longer sufficient to meet the growing needs of performance in avionics domain. Multi-core and many-core processors have emerged in the recent years in order to integrate several functions thanks to the resource sharing. In contrast, all multi-core and many-core processors do not necessarily satisfy the avionic constraints. We prefer to have more determinism than computing power because the certification of such processors depends on mastering the determinism.
The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the many-core processor (MPPA-256) from Kalray in avionic context. We choose the maintenance function HMS (Health Monitoring System) which requires an important bandwidth and a response time guarantee.
In addition, this function has also parallelism properties. It computes data from sensors that are functionally independent and, therefore their processing can be parallelized in several cores. This study focuses on deploying the existing sequential HMS on a many-core processor from the data acquisition to the computation of the health indicators with a strong emphasis on the input flow. Our research led to five main contributions:
- Transformation of the global existing algorithms into a real-time ones which can process data as soon as they are available.
- Management of the input flow of vibration samples from the sensors to the computation of the health indicators,
the availability of raw vibration data in the internal cluster, when they are consumed and finally the workload estimation.
- Implementing a lightweight Timing measurements directly on the MPPA-256 by adding timestamps in the data flow.
- Software architecture that respects real-time constraints even in the worst cases. The software architecture is based on three pipeline stages.
- Illustration of the limits of the existing function: our experiments have shown that the contextual parameters of the helicopter such as the rotor speed must be correlated with the health indicators to reduce false alarms.
