P-Socrates (2013-2016)
P-SOCRATES (Parallel Software Framework for Time-Critical Many-core Systems) is an European project which aims at allowing current and future applications with high-performance and real-time requirements to fully exploit the huge performance opportunities brought by the most advanced many-core accelerators, whilst ensuring a predictable performance and maintaining (or even reducing) development costs of applications. In this context, the digital circuit and systems group is exploring architectural extensions and evolutions to improve performance, scalability and timing predictability as well as facilitating programmability beyond what is possible with existing, heterogeneous embedded platforms. A key feature for transparent accelerator programming and efficient, fine-grained task offloading in heterogeneous systems is the support for shared virtual memory. While today's high-end heterogeneous systems more and more adapt this feature, the accelerators predominant in their low-power, embedded counterparts still rely on copy-based approaches which severely limit programmability and kill performance. Using dedicated hardware, driver-, runtime- and compiler-technology, the digital circuit and systems group has developed a transparent and lightweight form of shared virtual memory for accelerators in embedded, heterogeneous systems.