Title: A hardware accelerator for controlling access to multiple-unit resources in safety/time-critical systems

Authors: Philippe Marchand, Purnendu Sinha

Addresses: Department of National Defense, Ottawa, Canada. ' Philips Research India Bangalore, India

Abstract: In multitasking, priority-driven systems, resource access-control protocols such as Priority Ceiling Protocol (PCP) reduce the undesirable effects of resource contention. In general, software implementation of these protocols entails costly computations that can degrade the system performance to unacceptable levels. In this paper, we present the design for a hardware accelerator to execute the PCP functionality for controlling access to multiple-unit resources and illustrate that the proposed implementation accelerates the execution time by a factor of up to 30.

Keywords: resource access control algorithms; priority-driven systems; real-time operating systems; hardware accelerators; ICT; multiple-unit resources; safety systems; time-critical systems; priority ceiling protocol; PCP.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICT.2007.013278

International Journal of Information and Communication Technology, 2007 Vol.1 No.1, pp.62 - 75

Published online: 19 Apr 2007 *

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