Measurement based WCET Analysis for Multi-core Architectures

The interference on shared resources caused by concurrently executing applications unpredictably prolongs their execution. Hence, determination of the Worst Case Execution Time (Wcet) of applications executing on shared memory multi-core processors is hard to estimate. This hinders the adoption of Commercial Off The Shelf (Cots) multi-core processors in hard real-time systems. The existing techniques opt for tailored multi-core architectures to provide high computation power at predictable execution time. However, this approach yields poor resource utilization and high costs. In this paper, we present a technique to measure the Wcet of applications on multi-core architectures using existing measurement based timing analysis tools. Our technique has a minor area impact (≈ 5%). However, this impact is limited to the emulation devices only and production chips remain unchanged. Thus, our technique does not impact performance of the Cots chips by any ways. The technique is demonstrated by measuring Wcet of benchmark applications using the RapiTime timing analysis tool. The tests are conducted on a quad-core NIOS II processor on an Altera Fpga.