Jatin Arora successfully defended his PhD dissertation on Resource Contention-aware Multicore Real-Time Systems

On September 8th, Jatin Arora successfully defended his PhD thesis, supervised by Eduardo Tovar, and co-supervised by Claudio Maia and Luis Almeida, at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Portugal.

His thesis entitled "Shared Resource Contention-aware Schedulability Analysis of Hard Real-Time Systems" offers novel solutions for accurate quantification of shared resource contention that applications may suffer on COTS multicore platforms. Multicore processors have become mainstream today across several domains. However, their use in hard real-time systems, i.e., systems that execute tasks with stringent timing requirements, is still under scrutiny. The main challenge hindering the use of COTS multicore processors in hard real-time systems is the timing unpredictability stemming from the sharing of various hardware resources, such as caches, interconnects, and main memory. Consequently, accurate quantification of shared resource contention is essential to derive schedulability analysis. In his PhD, Jatin has mainly focused on bounding the contention suffered by tasks due to the sharing of memory bus, and DRAM-based memories. The results presented in the thesis significantly improve the accuracy of the schedulability analysis by tightening the bounds on memory bus and DRAM contention.

The PhD examination committee was composed of Prof. José Nuno Moura Marques Fidalgo, Associate Professor at FEUP, Prof. Renato Mancuso, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Boston University, USA, Prof. Isabelle Puaut, Full Professor at the University of Rennes, France,  Prof. Pedro Alexandre Guimarães Lobo Ferreira Souto, Assistant Professor of the Department of Computer Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto and Prof. Eduardo Manuel Medicis Tovar, Director of the CISTER Research Center (Advisor).