Multi-core Cyclic Executives for Safety-Critical Systems

In a cyclic executive, a series of pre-determined frames are executed in sequence; once the series is complete the sequence is repeated. Within each frame individual units of computation are executed, again in a pre-specified sequence. The implementation of cyclic executives upon multi-core platforms is considered. A Linear Programming (LP) based formulation is presented of the problem of constructing cyclic executives upon multiprocessors for a particular kind of recurrent real-time workload – collections of implicit-deadline periodic tasks. Techniques are described for solving the LP formulation under different kinds of restrictions in order to obtain preemptive and non-preemptive cyclic executives.