HiB is a partner in the EU Horizon 2020 project COEMS – Continuous Observation of Embedded Multicore Systems, which has recently been funded with 3.9M EUR across five academic and industrial partners. The ability to observe the internals of an execution of a computer-based system is a fundamental requirement for ultimately ensuring correctness and safe behaviour. Within COEMS, a novel, FPGA-based, observer platform with supporting verification methods for software systems is created. COEMS tackles the issues of detection and identification of non-deterministic software failures caused by race conditions and access to inconsistent data. It gives insight to the system’s actual behaviour without affecting it, allowing new verification methods.
Within the project, the following thesis topics are available:
- ZedBoard-based development of a monitoring prototype. Think of a ZedBoard as an Arduino, instead that of peripheral sensors and motors you connect an FPGA: data needs to be collected from the FPGA, processed locally, and either exported (e.g. through a web-interface), or synchronized to remote cloud storage via the network.
- Visualization of common correctness-problems in software. The FPGA will monitor software running on a multicore processor for performance metrics, timing constraints and common defects, such as deadlocks, race conditions, or user-specified properties. To demonstrate the system and evaluate the performance, a prospective student identify relevant performance measurement- , timing- , and bug categories, and develop short examples for each. These will then be used by a test-suite that will demonstrate how COEMS technology discovers the bug (especially so-called
Mandelbugs
that occur non-deterministically).
Visits to project partners in Germany (University of Lübeck and Accemic, Bavaria) are possible through the ERASMUS program.
Requirements:
- Interest in software development
- Interest software bugs/verification
- Prototyping on experimental hardware
Contact: Volker Stolz