MultiCore Hardware Experiments in Software Producibility Final Technical Report

This final technical report was prepared for the Air Force Research Laboratory, under award #FA8750-08-1-0024, titled “MultiCore Hardware Experiments in Software Producibility,” responsible program officer, Steven Drager. This report details our findings when taking heterogenous systems software, designed for a distributed environment, and running it on a single-core, and later multi-core, computers. Our research outcomes are significant, indicating that in our case, significant variance was seen in system performance, and that the variance increased with the number of cores used. We also created some strategies to reduce this variance, namely a weak time triggered infrastructure, which we imposed upon the system: this strategy significantly reduced the variance of behaviors when trading up to multicore processors.