05/15/12 New white paper on real-time challenges programming advanced multicore chips
Multicore chips are becoming more and more the norm these days. This is an evolution driven by the semiconductor advances that allow to put more and more logic on the same die. In addition, as all is on a single die, communication between cores can be speedy and low power as no off-chip I/O is necessary. Nevertheless programming these chips, especially for embedded real-time applications is a challenge. Following the availability of OpenComRTOS on the 48-core Intel SCC chip and the 8-core Texas Instruments C6678, Altreonic can draw some lessons. OpenComRTOS was designed to support such targets transparently and in a distributed real-time context by separating the hardware topology definition from the application topology definition.
04/09/12 Altreonic releases GoedelWorks project portal
Altreonic today announced the availability of its GoedelWorks internet based portal for safety and systems engineering project support under a SaaS model. GoedelWorks is a technology platform for collaborative systems and safety engineering project delivery. Uniquely developed for global and distributed teams, GoedelWorks is designed to facilitate how people work together to build systems and products, making project delivery more collaborative, productive, and transparent. You can think of GoedelWorks as an extensible framework that dynamically integrates and synchronizes people, processes, and resources associated with systems engineering development projects. From very small chips to large networked systems, GoedelWorks is the platform that facilitates teamwork and project management.
03/30/12 Altreonic joins RTCA
Altreonic is now member of RTCA, Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics. RTCA, Inc. is a private, not-for-profit corporation that develops consensus-based recommendations regarding communications, navigation, surveillance, and air traffic management (CNS/ATM) system issues. RTCA functions as a Federal Advisory Committee. Membership of RTCA will help us supporting the avionics industry better.
02/06/12 Workshop Concurrent Embedded Programming - additional sessions
This workshop aims at debunking the myth that writing concurrent programs for many-core, multi-core, parallel and distributed (embedded) systems is difficult. On the contrary, a single approach with a solid formal basis can handle them all, including reusing existing sequential code. The workshop will first explain how software writing is really developing a software model of a real (or virtual) system. Such systems are often inherently concurrent and can be expressed as a set of "interacting entities".
12/16/11 Workshop Concurrent Embedded Programming
A single approach for many-multi-parallel-distributed systems
Organized by Altreonic January 16th, The Concurrent Embedded Programming workshop aims at debunking the myth that writing concurrent programs for many-core, multi-core, parallel and distributed (embedded) systems is difficult. On the contrary, as single approach with a solid formal basis can handle them all, including reusing existing sequential code. The workshop will first explain how software writing is really developing a software model of a real (or virtual) system. Such systems are often inherently concurrent and can be expressed as a set of "interacting entities".
09/27/11 GödelWorks development seeks beta-users
Altreonic has recently picked up the results of the participation of Open License Society's R&D partner in the ITEA EVOLVE project. This project has been looking at methods to support evolutionary and incremental verification, validation and certification. This has allowed to continue the research on a formalisation of the systems engineering processes. The result was what we called a universal "systems grammar" or a meta-modeling approach to use a more common term. The approach was tried out in the OpenCookBook environment. Altreonic has restarted the development to greatly improve the user interaction capabilities and the result is the GödelWorks web based platform...
09/23/11 Altreonic partner in FP7 IP OPENCOSS project
OPENCOSS (Open Platform for EvolutioNary Certification of Safety-critical Systems) is a recently approved R&D project. The project 17 partners aim at a common certification framework that spans different vertical markets for the railway, avionics and automotive industry, and establish a common safety certification infrastructure. The strategy is to focus on a compositional and evolutionary certification approach with the capability to reuse safety arguments, safety evidence, and contextual information about system components, in a way that makes certification more cost-effective, precise, and scalable...
09/07/11 The book on the OpenComRTOS project is out. Lessons learned.
Now available from Springer and Amazon
While published by a scientific publisher, this book is not a purely scientific one. But it shows how the state of the art in science can be applied to a real industrial development with great benefit. It documents (incompletely but sufficiently) the journey of the OpenComRTOS project. This project started out with the goal to see how we could apply formal methods to embedded software development. And because we had a background in a distributed Real-Time Operating System, we decided to use the design from scratch as a target...
08/15/11 OpenComRTOS supports high performance C66xx DSP of Texas Instruments
Altreonic is announcing a port of OpenComRTOS to the high performance C66xx DSP of Texas Instruments and integrating it in the OpenComRTOS Designer environment. A full kernel with all services only requires between 5.1 to 7.7 KBytes for program memory depending on the compile time options and services used. This was measured by compiling a minimal application for a C6670 target with program placement in L2 SRAM comparing the results using a mapfile analyser. Nevertheless, this is still a complete priority based preemptive scheduling RTOS with support for distributed priority inheritance...
08/04/11 OpenComRTOS supports high performance PowerPC of Freescale
Altreonic is announcing a port of OpenComRTOS to the high performance PowerPC processors of Freescale and integrating it in the OpenComRTOS Designer environment. A full kernel with all services only requires between 7.9 to 10.4 KBytes for program memory and less than 6 KBytes of data memory, depending on the compile time options and services used. This was measured by compiling a minimal application for an e600 target with Altivec support and comparing the results using a mapfile analyser. Nevertheless, this is still a complete priority based preemptive scheduling RTOS with support for distributed priority inheritance...
04/22/11 What is an Open Technology License?
"Open" is one of those words that is used a lot. It came into being as a reaction to the closed software offered by many software vendors. Since then Open and Free have become intermingled although it is not by lack of variants of open source licensing schemes. So why did we create another "Open Licensing" scheme? It all goes back to some 10 years ago when we conducted a market research for one of our customers in the space sector. They wanted to find an alternative for a distributed RTOS. There aren't that many RTOS around that can handle multi-processing systems in a transparent way. The shocking discovery however was that the bulk of all RTOS, commercial or open source could not be certified, even when already available for years and that is true for a lot of software products. There are exceptions, but to start with, design documents are a rarity...
04/12/11 Traditional programming has hit the power wall
A recent article in EE-Times Europe states that computing has hit a power wall. Indeed, chip designers spoiled programmers in the past with ever increasing amount of compute cycles and memory space to waste. This has lead to great new features, which we all would like to keep, however the way we program these hardware monsters has not really changed. Yes compilers have become better in optimising code, but everything after has stayed the same. The linking phase of C / C++ programs is still largely a brute force operation, including everything the program might need and very often code that never will be executed. This leads to enormously bloated programs, that have to be a) stored in non-volatile storage, and b) in the RAM of the system that execute them. A simple “Hello World” might need a few Mbytes and links in 10000’s of functions...
03/29/11 Source code included. New API manual for OpenComRTOS 1.4
Following the imminent release of the Springer book on OpenComRTOS, Altreonic has decided to now include the kernel source code and the build system with its licenses. Hence the binary license is dropped and replaced with the source code license. With v 1.4. also a new users manual was released coovering all integrated tools as well as the Safe Virtual Machine for C. The OpenTracer is now also available as a stand-alone tool. Download the latest Win32 OpenComRTOS suite and the new manual from the download section. This is a unique opportunity to discover that parallel concurrent programming on large heterogenous networked processors, whether on a single chip or physically widely distributed, is not difficult at all. Provided the right paradigm is used from the very beginning. We call it "Interacting Entities"...
03/21/11 What's the lifetime of a digital processor?
Before this question can be answered, we need to refine the question. A simple answer could be that the lifetime of a processor is equal to its MTTF or Mean Time To Failure. This doesn't help us a lot because the MTTF is not a unique number. Leaving out the mean calculation, just like interrupt latency the Time To Failure is not a unique number. It is a histogram and the distribution will depend on the usage pattern.So, let's restrict the search space. Assume we have an industry grade (-40°C to 85°C) standard microcontroller. Take your favorite brand and assume as well that it has been burned in so that we are in the safe flat bottom of the bath tube curve. We switch it on, use it and now we wait till it fails. We do this a statistically significant number of times, record the numbers and calculate the MTBF. What can we expect?
