P-SOCRATES project begins

I recently attended the first meeting of the P-SOCRATES project as an Industrial Advisory Board member, hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. P-SOCRATES (Parallel SOftware framework for time-CRitical mAny-core sysTemS) is an EU research project combining recent developments from high performance computing and embedded systems. The intended outcome of the project is a framework which will allow applications to exploit massively parallel computation capabilities in a predictable way. As an added bonus, we also got the opportunity to visit the Mare Nostrum supercomputer (pictured below).

Figure 1: The Mare Nostrum supercomputer

Projects like P-SOCRATES are important because multi-core and many-core systems are widely predicted as the future of many aspects of computing, giving, among many other benefits, extremely good power consumption relative to equivalent single core systems. One thing that we're especially aware of is that multi-core and many-core present a significant challenge to writing applications to meet real-time deadlines. While their average-case performance usually improves significantly, worst-case limits become harder, if not impossible to predict. We look forward to P-SOCRATES contribution to this important area. More information at https://p-socrates.github.io/