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2nd International Workshop on Analysis Tools and Methodologies for Embedded and Real-time Systems

July, 5th 2011, Porto, Portugal

in conjunction with
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WATERS 2010

Tools

This page collects a set of reusable software components, tools and data sets which may be conveniently used by researchers in order to enhance comparability of their research with the one made by others.

We have created a Google Group for people who participated into the WATERS workshop, and not only. Here you can discuss about the usage of tools for research purposes, announce availability of new tools, ask for support, etc. Feel free to invite potentially interested colleagues of yours to join this forum.
MAST2
MAST defines a model to describe the timing behaviour of real-time systems designed to be analyzable via schedulability analysis techniques. MAST also provides an open-source set of tools to perform schedulability analysis or other timing analysis, with the goal of assessing whether the system will be able to meet its timing requirements, and, via sensitivity analysis, how far or close is the system from meeting its timing requirements.
One work presented at the workshop introduces the schedulability model that will enable an automatic schedulability analysis of an application using switched networks. Switched networks have an increasingly important role in real-time communications. The IEEE ethernet standards have defined prioritized traffic (802.1p) and other QoS mechanisms (802.1q). The Avionics Full-Duplex Switched Ethernet (AFDX) standard defines a hard real-time network based on switched ethernet.
The other work related to MAST 2 presented at the workshop introduces the new modelling elements that have been defined to model real-time applications that are designed and executed relying on a resource reservation paradigm. These modelling elements bring together into one single object the two different views (application design and application deployment) that are used to describe a virtual resource through its life cycle. The negotiation process between the application and the resource reservation middleware, which is carried out to make the designed application compatible with the current workload of the platform, can be seen as the pursuit of a configuration that makes both views compatible.
Tracealyzer
Tracealyzer is a tool for embedded software tracing. This records and visualize the runtime behavior of the software, which is highly valuable for troubleshooting and optimization.
REALprof
Energy consumption evaluation is a critical issue in the design phase of system-on-chips (SoCs) and embedded systems. However, conventional approaches suffer from difficulties in providing fast and accurate estimation and evaluation results, especially for complicated multi-core embedded systems. In this paper, we propose and implement a hardware-assisted energy consumption evaluation tool for an embedded system. Our system, called reconfigurable hardware-assisted log profiler (REALprof), uses a programmable profiling hardware to monitor runtime programs, automatically record the energy related parameters of the system, and thus can estimate the system energy consumption based on the logs in the memory without introducing software profiling overhead. Our prototype works with a quad-core embedded system at 100 MHz on an FPGA platform and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed profiling tool provides fast and fine-grained evaluation of energy consumption of a multi-core embedded system.
SMFF
SMFF is a framework for parameter-driven generation of models of distributed real-time systems. The generated models incorporate a description of the platform, of the software applications mapped onto the platform and the associated scheduling and timing parameters, thus covering the entire model specification. These models can be used for evaluation and development of e.g. scheduling or allocation algorithms or algorithms for performance verification. This allows to verify these algorithms against a large and diverse set of testcases, which is required whenever to formal bounds on performance can be given e.g. if heuristics are employed. To account for the diverse needs algorithm developers may have, the tool is developed in a modular way allowing to exchange and extend the system model as well as the single testcase generation steps.
The IRMOS Real-Time Scheduler [Presentation] [OSPERT'09 Paper]
The IRMOS real-time scheduler allows to reserve a "slice" of the processing capability of a multi-core or multi-processor system to a group of threads and/or processes (shortly, tasks). This is achieved by a hard-reservation variant of the EDF-based Constant Bandwidth Server (CBS) scheduler. Furthermore, internally to each group, the scheduler features global priority-based scheduling.
RTSIM and ARSim
RTSIM is a collection of reusable C++ components for simulating real-time (control) systems. The tool is capable of simulating symmetric multi-core systems with global or partitioned scheduling strategies (RR, FP, EDF), including the ones based on servers (SS, PS, CBS, GRUB).
ARSim is an event-based tool for simulating arbitrary DAGs of real-time applications running on multiple (possibly heterogeneous) resources, including computing and networking resources, when these are scheduled according to a resource-reservation paradigm. Contrarily to RTSIM, that performs low-level scheduling, ARSim works at a higher level of abstraction, using a consistent model for updating the evolution of an application scheduling error across the workflow stages and time.
MCoreSim
MCoreSim is an open-source simulation framework for massively parallel and many-core computing systems based on OMNeT++. The simulator supports tile-based architectures with distributed memory and mesh-based interconnects. Its primary purpose is to allow for investigations on the impact of the heterogeneous in-chip communication latencies, as arising due to the network-on-a-chip structure of future and emerging many-core processors, on the performance of the hosted applications.
Erika Enterprise and RT-Druid
Erika Enterprise is a free of charge, open-source implementation of the OSEK/VDX API. It is supported by RT-Druid, a set of Eclipse plugins implementing an OSEK OIL compiler, able to produce an OSEK ORTI file compatible with Lauterbach Trace32 debuggers. Erika Enterprise provides a minimal footprint of 1-4 kB Flash and an easy-to-use API.

Related Tools

This is a list of other reusable tools not directly presented at WATERS, which might be useful for other researchers working in the area of real-time and embedded systems.
INTERESTED European Project
The INTERESTED project aims to create a reference and open interoperable embedded systems tool-chain, fulfilling the needs of the industry for designing and prototyping embedded systems.
WATERS 2010 Tools
Check out the tools page from the WATERS 2010 website for additional tools.