TimeWall: Enabling Time Partitioning for Real-Time Multicore+Accelerator Platforms

Abstract

Across a range of safety-critical domains, an evolution is underway to endow embedded systems with "thinking" capabilities by using artificial-intelligence (AI) techniques. This evolution is being fueled by the availability of high-performance embedded hardware, typically multicore machines augmented with accelerators. Unfortunately, existing software certification processes rely on time partitioning to isolate system components, and this sense of isolation can be broken by accelerator usage. To address this issue, this paper presents TimeWall, a time-partitioning framework for multicore+accelerator platforms. When applied alongside existing methods for alleviating spatial interference, TimeWall can help enable component-wise certification on multicore+accelerator platforms. The challenges in realizing a TimeWall implementation are discussed in detail in this paper. Additionally, the temporal isolation TimeWall affords is examined experimentally, including via a case study of a computer-vision perception application, on a real platform.