Introduction

Multiprocessor architectures are becoming more and more attractive. From single-core designs with heat and thermal problems, chip makers are now shifting to multicore technologies. While making them decreasingly expensive, they are making very powerful platforms available. Such platforms are desirable for embedded system applications with high computational workloads such as robot controls, image processing, or streaming audio. The additional characteristic of such applications is to meet some real-time constraints ; consequently they require predictable performance guarantees from the underlying operating system. This has led to renewed interest in multiprocessor real-time scheduling: scheduling algorithms together with schedulability analysis

STORM is a Simulation TOol for Real time Multiprocessor scheduling. From the specification of the characteristics of a software architecture (the tasks to schedule), a hardware architecture (the resources for implementing these tasks) and the choice of a scheduling policy, the tool simulates the execution of these tasks on these resources according to the rules of this policy.

As shown in this figure, the specification of architectures and scheduling policy is via an XML file to provide as input of the tool. The result of simulation is a set of execution tracks that are either made directly observable through diagrams, or recorded into files for a subsequent computer-aided analysis.