Supporting execution on multiprocessor platforms

Abstract

Multiprocessor platforms are becoming the norm for more powerful embedded real-time systems. Although Ada allows its tasks to be executed on such platforms it provides no explicit support that allows programmers to map tasks to processors. If Ada is going to be an effective language for multiprocessor systems then it needs to address the mapping issue that will allow the programmer to express their requirements for task to processor affinity. A number of different mapping and scheduling approaches are advocated in the scheduling literature. The primitives in the language should allow these schemes to be directly supported. In this paper we propose a minimum set of such primitives, with the aim of initiating a debate that will lead to an agreed language change that can be accepted within the Ada community.