EECS Research Selected as IEEE Outstanding Paper

A paper submitted to the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS) by EECS graduate students Prathap Kumar Valsan and Farzad Farshchi along with Professor Heechul Yun was designated as an Outstanding Paper. Outstanding Papers will be identified as such in the conference proceedings and the program. Their paper is titled “Taming Non-blocking Caches to Improve Isolation in Multicore Real-Time Systems.” It proposes a new hardware and system software (OS) collaborative approach that improves temporal isolation of multicore based safety-critical real-time systems. This paper shows that, contrary to the commonly held assumption in the real-time systems community, cache partitioning does not necessarily ensure predictable cache performance in modern multicore platforms due to contention in special hardware registers in non-blocking caches, known as Miss Status Holding Registers (MSHRs). The proposed technique is implemented in a cycle-accurate full system simulator and the Linux 3.14 kernel, and is shown to be effective in improving isolation compared to a baseline cache partitioning setup.