P-SOCRATES (Parallel Software Framework for Time-Critical Many-core Systems) was a European project intended to allow current and future applications with high-performance and real-time requirements to fully exploit the huge performance opportunities brought by the most advanced many-core processors, whilst ensuring a predictable performance and maintaining (or even reducing) development costs of applications.

The purpose of P-SOCRATES was to develop an entirely new design framework, from the conceptual design of the system functionality to its physical implementation, to facilitate the deployment of standardized parallel architectures in all kinds of systems. This framework was released under the brand of UpScale SDK.

The SDK includes the following components:

• Source to source compiler – enabling to analyze source code OpenMP parallelism annotations, extracting the required information to allow for efficient and predictable mapping and scheduling of parallel computations.
• Lightweight OpenMP tasking runtime – a small-footprint implementation of the tasking model of the latest OpenMP specification, which uses the information extracted by the compiler to map OpenMP tasks to operating systems threads. 
• Embedded Many-Core Operating System – a small kernel implementation which efficiently handles parallel threads in manycore platforms, supporting both static assignment of threads to cores as well as global scheduling approaches.
• Analysis tools – an integrated toolset for the timing and schedulability analysis of real-time parallel applications.

The scientific and technical work done in the P-SOCRATES project was published in the open access book “High-Performance and Time-Predictable Embedded Computing”.

The topics discussed in the book include:

• Parallel embedded platforms
• Programming models
• Mapping and scheduling of parallel computations
• Timing and schedulability analysis
• Runtimes and operating systems

A short summary of the project can be found here.

The P-SOCRATES project was developed by a consortium led by Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Portugal, with partners Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, Spain, University of Modena and Regio Emilia, Italy, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Switzerland, Evidence SRL, Italy, Active Technologies SRL, Italy and ATOS, Spain.

Contact: Prof. Luis Miguel Pinho