Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

Capacités: Projet “Investissement d'Avenir”, 1/11/14 to 31/01/2018

Participants : Damien Hardy, Isabelle Puaut, Viet Anh Nguyen, Sébastien Martinez.

The project objective is to develop a hardware and software platform based on manycore architectures, and to demonstrate the relevance of these manycore architectures (and more specifically the Kalray manycore) for several industrial applications. The Kalray MPPA manycore architecture is currently the only one able to meet the needs of embedded systems simultaneously requiring high performance, lower power consumption, and the ability to meet the requirements of critical systems (low latency I/O, deterministic processing times, and dependability).

The project partners are Kalray (lead), Airbus, Open-Wide, Safran Sagem, IS2T, Real Time at Work, Dassault Aviation, Eurocopter, MBDA, ProbaYes, IRIT, Onera, Verimag, Inria, Irisa, Tima and Armines.

Zero Power Computing Systems (ZEP): Inria Project Lab, 2017–2020

Participant : Erven Rohou.

This proposal addresses the issue of designing tiny wireless, batteryless, computing objects, harvesting energy in the environment. The energy level harvested being very low, very frequent energy shortages are expected. In order for the new system to maintain a consistent state, it will be based on a new architecture embedding non-volatile RAM (NVRAM). In order to benefit from the hardware innovations related to energy harvesting and NVRAM, software mechanisms will be designed. On the one hand, a compilation pass will compute a worst-case energy consumption. On the other hand, dedicated runtime mechanisms will allow:

1. to manage efficiently and correctly the NVRAM-based hardware architecture;

2. to use energy intelligently, by using the worst-case energy consumption.

The ZEP project gathers four Inria teams that have a scientific background in architecture, compilation, operating systems together with the CEA Lialp and Lisan laboratories of CEA LETI & LIST. The main application target is Internet of Things (IoT).

ANR Continuum 2015–2019

Participants : Erven Rohou, Rabab Bouziane.

The CONTINUUM project aims to address the energy-efficiency challenge in future computing systems by investigating a design continuum for compute nodes, which seamlessly goes from software to technology levels via hardware architecture. Power saving opportunities exist at each of these levels, but the real measurable gains will come from the synergistic focus on all these levels as considered in this project. Then, a cross-disciplinary collaboration is promoted between computer science and microelectronics, to achieve two main breakthroughs: i) combination of state-of-the-art heterogeneous adaptive embedded multicore architectures with emerging communication and memory technologies and, ii) power-aware dynamic compilation techniques that suitably match such a platform.

Continuum started on Oct 1st 2015. Partners are LIRMM and Cortus SAS.

ANR W-SEPT 2012-2017

Participants : Isabelle Puaut, Erven Rohou.

Critical embedded systems are generally composed of repetitive tasks that must meet drastic timing constraints, such as termination deadlines. Providing an upper bound of the worst-case execution time (WCET) of such tasks at design time is thus necessary to prove the correctness of the system. Static WCET estimation methods, although safe, may produce largely over-estimated values. The objective of the project is to produce tighter WCET estimates by discovering and transforming flow information at all levels of the software design process, from high level-design models (e.g. Scade, Simulink) down to binary code.

The ANR W-SEPT project partners are Verimag Grenoble, IRIT Toulouse, Inria Rennes. A case study is provided by Continental Toulouse.