Roberts: reconfigurable platform for benchmarking real-time systems

This paper presents Roberts, a Reconfigurable platfOrm for BEnchmarking Real-Time Systems. Roberts is the first platform which can be customised for a given system-under-test to support benchmarking of real-time properties and energy consumption. The benchmarking takes into account system workload and environmental events, with facilities for generating test vectors conforming to the specification of systemunder- test, and with support for on-line monitoring of the response time, output values and energy consumption. The proposed benchmarking platform has been implemented in the DE4 development system to provide cycle-accurate timing measurement at nano-second precision to analyse high performance applications. An evaluation of our approach shows that the platform can be used in analysing the performance of target applications and overheads of other timing facilities, such as the interval timer on processors.

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