Emerging safety-critical systems require high-performance data-parallel architectures and, problematically, ones that can guarantee tight and safe worst-case execution times. Given the complexity of existing architectures like GPUs, it is unlikely that sufficiently accurate models and algorithms for timing analysis will emerge in the foreseeable future. This motivates our work on Sim-D, a clean-slate approach to designing a real-time data-parallel architecture. Sim-D enforces a predictable execution model by isolating compute- and access resources in hardware. The DRAM controller uninterruptedly transfers tiles of data, requested by entire work-groups. This permits work-groups to be executed as a sequence of deterministic access- and compute phases, scheduling phases from up to two work-groups in parallel. Evaluation using a cycle-accurate timing model shows that Sim-D can achieve performance on par with an embedded-grade NVIDIA TK1 GPU under two conditions: applications refrain from using indirect DRAM transfers into large buffers, and Sim-D's scratchpads provide sufficient bandwidth. Sim-D's design facilitates derivation of safe WCET bounds that are tight within 12.7 percent on average, at an additional average performance penalty of$\sim$9.2 percent caused by scheduling restrictions on phases.

This paper explores the problem of how to improve the average-case performance of real-time locking protocols, preferably without significantly deteriorating worst-case performance. Motivated by the futex implementation in Linux, where uncontended lock operations under the Priority Inheritance Protocol (PIP) do not incur mode-switching overheads, we extend this concept to more sophisticated protocols, namely the PCP, the MPCP and the FMLP+. We identify the challenges involved in implementing futexes for these protocols and present the design and evaluation of their implementations in LITMUSRT, a real-time extension of the Linux kernel. Our evaluation shows substantial improvements in the uncontended case (e.g., A futex implementation of the PCP lowers lock acquisition and release overheads by up to 75% and 92%, respectively), at the expense of some increases in worst-case overhead on par with Linux's existing futex implementation.