M2OS-Mc: An RTOS for Many-Core Processors

Abstract

A current trend of industrial systems is reducing space, weight and power (SWaP) through the allocation of different applications on a single chip. This is enabled by the continued improvement of semiconductor technology which allows the integration of multiple cores in a single processor chip, as the processors are prevented to continue increasing their clock rate due to the “power-wall”. The use of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) multi-core processors for real-time purposes presents issues due to the shared bus used to access the shared memory. An alternative to the use of multi-core processors are the many-core processors with tens to hundreds of processors in the same chip, using different scalable ways to interconnect their cores. This paper presents the adaptation of the M2OS Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) and its simplified Ada run-time for mesh-based many-core processors. This RTOS is called M2OS-mc and has been tested on the Epiphany III many-core processor (referred in this paper simply as Epiphany), a many-core which has 16 cores connected by a Network-on-Chip (NoC) consisting of a 4x4 2D mesh. In order to have a synchronized way to send messages between tasks through the NoC independently of the core where they are being executed, we provide sampling port communication primitives. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Computer systems organization → Real-time operating systems