Extensive usage of specific proprietary components in the existing hardware/software (HW/SW) platforms for safety-critical systems limits the performance, flexibility and testability of such systems, jeopardizing their wide deployment across domains. Despite some research attempts have been made to overcome these limitataions, they had very limited success in the industry due to missing flexibility and extensibility, as many industries need technologies on which they can rely over the course of decades (e.g. avionics, space, automotive).
A number of high-performance computing (HPC) commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) platforms offer the computation capabilities, including multicores, graphics processing units (GPUs) and other hardware accelerators, needed by autonomous systems in diverse application domains, such as automotive, space, avionics, robotics and factory automation. Unfortunately, the utilization of HPC platforms has been traditionally considered out of the reach of the safety-critical systems industry due to the difficulties or roadblocks these platforms bring to the certification process.
The objective of the SELENE is to cover this gap in the design of safety-critical HW/SW systems, by proposing a new family of high-performance safety-critical computing platforms that build upon open-source components such as RISC-V cores and GNU/Linux. The SELENE platform implements several mechanisms for flexible diverse redundancy, supports compute intensive applications using specific accelerators for artificial intelligence and cryptography, and includes partitioning and monitoring capabilities that ease the integration of applications of different criticalities.
