We introduce Silverline, a novel framework for lightweight virtualization and orchestration of distributed real-time systems. Leveraging WebAssembly (Wasm) for robust sandboxing and multi-language (polyglot) capabilities, Silverline decouples applications from their platforms through distinct manifests, enabling a centralized orchestrator to optimize resource allocation and deploy Wasm modules seamlessly across the edge-cloud continuum. It features a split data and control plane with orchestration sidecars, allowing applications to use native communication protocols and respond autonomously to network changes. We evaluate our framework in two real application contexts: an industrial automation use-case and an automotive body electronics demonstrator. Through micro-benchmarks and end-to-end testing, we demonstrate Silverline's potential for managing real-time workloads in diverse heterogeneous ecosystems.

Energy-harvesting devices eliminate batteries, instead collecting their operating energy from environmental sources. A device stores energy into a capacitor, drawing energy to perform tasks and powering off to recharge when the energy is exhausted. State-of-the-art charge management systems for these devices aim to avoid power failure during task execution by reasoning about task energy cost. We identify that the innate equivalent series resistance (ESR) in energy storage capacitors breaks energy-based systems’ guarantees; running high current load on a high-ESR capacitor causes a substantial voltage drop that rebounds once the load is removed. This voltage drop is disregarded by systems that only reason about energy. If the drop lowers the voltage below the system’s operating threshold, however, the device powers off while stored energy remains. Though ESR is well understood in hardware design, this is the first work to argue that software for batteryless devices must also be aware of ESR.This work presents Culpeo, a hardware/software mechanism and architectural interface to relay the effect of ESR in the power system to software. We develop static and dynamic implementations of Culpeo and demonstrate on real batteryless devices that considering ESR restores correctness guarantees broken by energy-only charge management. We then demonstrate how to integrate Culpeo’s safe voltage into state-of-the-art schedulers, restoring task deadline guarantees for applications with predictable energy harvesting. Finally, we propose an on-chip Culpeo hardware implementation that allows for runtime monitoring of the effects of ESR to respond to changes in harvestable power.

Batteryless energy-harvesting devices are computing platforms that operate in environments where batteries are not viable for energy storage. Energy-harvesting devices operate intermittently, only as energy is available. Prior work developed software execution models robust to intermittent power failures but no existing intermittent execution model allows interrupts to update global persistent state without allowing incorrect behavior or requiring complex programming. We present Coati, a system that supports event-driven concurrency via interrupts in an intermittent software execution model. Coati exposes a task-based interface for synchronous computations and an event interface for asynchronous interrupts. Coati supports synchronizing tasks and events using transactions, which allow for multi-task atomic regions that extend across multiple power failures. This work explores two different models for serializing events and tasks that both safely provide intuitive semantics for event-driven intermittent programs. We implement a prototype of Coati as C language extensions and a runtime library. Using energy-harvesting hardware, we evaluate Coati on benchmarks adapted from prior work. We show that Coati prevents failures when interrupts are introduced, while the baseline fails in just seconds. Moreover, Coati operates with a reasonable run time overhead that is often comparable to an idealized baseline.

Battery-free, energy-harvesting devices operate using energy collected exclusively from their environment. Energy-harvesting devices allow maintenance-free deployment in extreme environments, but requires a power system to provide the right amount of energy when an application needs it. Existing systems must provision energy capacity statically based on an application's peak demand which compromises efficiency and responsiveness when not at peak demand. This work presents Capybara: a co-designed hardware/software power system with dynamically reconfigurable energy storage capacity that meets varied application energy demand. The Capybara software interface allows programmers to specify the energy mode of an application task. Capybara's runtime system reconfigures Capybara's hardware energy capacity to match application demand. Capybara also allows a programmer to write reactive application tasks that pre-allocate a burst of energy that it can spend in response to an asynchronous (e.g., external) event. We instantiated Capybara's hardware design in two EH devices and implemented three reactive sensing applications using its software interface. Capybara improves event detection accuracy by 2x-4x over statically-provisioned energy capacity, maintains response latency within 1.5x of a continuously-powered baseline, and enables reactive applications that are intractable with existing power systems.