Multi-cores Partitioning for Trusted Embedded Systems (MULTIPARTES)

Framework: FP7 — Cooperation
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Destination: Alternative Paths to Components and Systems
Action type: Collaborative project
Countries involved: Spain,Spain,Austria,Spain,France,Greece,Spain
Call:  (FP7-ICT-2011-7, 2011)
Start date: 2011-09-01
End date: 2014-12-31
Duration (months): 40.0
Total project cost (EUR): 3666929.0
EU funding (EUR): 2850000.0
Participants: 10
Project status: CLOSED

Growing complexity of applications makes the integration of security and dependability an issue in many domains (e.g. energy supply, transportation, industrial control, aerospace, etc). The engineering of embedded systems needs to take these aspects into account. However, guaranteeing security and dependability in a situation of increasing system complexity is leading to unacceptable development cost and time to market, especially for SMEs, due to the price of tools. The main challenge of this project is supporting mixed criticality embedded systems on multicore open source virtualized platforms in such a way that the development, validation and certification efforts can be lower than the corresponding effort required on independent hardware platforms when using an appropriate methodology. An approach to increasing maintainability and to avoid the growing validation and certification effort is to incorporate mechanisms that establish multiple partitions on the same hardware platform with strict temporal and spatial separation between the individual partitions. In this approach, applications with different levels of dependability can be placed in different partitions and can be validated (and certified if required) in isolation, the MultiPARTES approach. This allows the user to manage complexity while keeping down an escalation of the development effort, but this concept needs to be adapted and applied to multicore and heterogeneous multicore systems. This project aims at developing tools and solutions based on mixed criticality virtualization systems for multicore platforms. The starting point for the virtualization support is XtratuM, a cost-effective open source hypervisor developed specifically for real-time embedded systems by one of the project participants (UPVLC) – a hypervisor that is being increasingly used by the aerospace industry. Based on this approach, MultiPARTES will offer a rapid and cost-effective development support of dependable real-time embedded systems enabling critical and non critical applications to run on the same hardware platform. To achieve this goal we will develop an innovative multicore-platform virtualization layer based on XtratuM. We will devise a methodology permitting the partitioning of multicore systems, thereby speeding up development and production of mixed-criticality applications based on the partitioning. We will demonstrate these open virtualization solutions on COTS hardware platforms and on enhanced heterogeneous multicore hardware platforms to show the increase of time and space isolation, overcoming some of the COTS hardware limitations. The results will be evaluated in case studies in three application sectors: wind power, video surveillance and aerospace.

Keywords: virtualization,multicore,embedded systems,trust,security