Outstanding Paper Award: Making Shared Caches More Predictable on Multicore Platforms

In safety-critical cyber-physical systems, the usage of multicore platforms has been hampered by problems due to interactions across cores through shared hardware. The inability to precisely characterize such interactions can lead to worst-case execution time pessimism that is so great, the extra processing capacity of additional cores is entirely negated. In this paper, several techniques are proposed and analyzed for dealing with such interactions in the context of shared caches. These techniques are applied in a mixed-criticality scheduling framework motivated by the needs of next-generation unmanned air vehicles.