LIONESS Improving and Leveraging OpenMP for the Efficient and Safe Use of New High-Performance Hardware Platforms
Sara Royuela, Franck Wartel, Sylvain Tiberio, Éric Jenn, Hubert Guérard, Guy Bois · ACM SIGAda Ada Letters · 2025
The number and diversity of embedded Field- Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) Multi-Processor Systems On Chip (MPSoCs) in modern satellites is increasing, and so is the complexity and cost of using them efficiently (i.e., optimally exploiting the available resources) and safely (i.e., complying with the applicable safety and availability constraints). Programming languages traditionally used in critical real-time systems have yet to be designed to address the extreme parallelism of modern platforms. To address this limitation, OpenMP, the de-facto standard for exploiting parallelism in shared-memory systems in the HPC domain, is increasingly considered a suitable solution in critical domains. OpenMP implements a comprehensive set of computation models (e.g., data and task parallelism, host and accelerator support), comes with an extensive set of assets (e.g., tools, libraries), and supports a large set of CPU and accelerator devices (e.g., GR740, MPPA, NVIDIA Jetson and Xilinx Ultrascale+). Despite preliminary analysis proving the productivity and efficiency of OpenMP in the space, automotive and railway domains, some challenges must be addressed. This paper introduces LIONESS, a project funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) proposing an advanced OpenMP framework that combines enhancements in the parallel programming model with adapted compiler and runtime systems to provide benefits along two axes: (1) resilience, through providing fault-tolerance techniques, and (2) heterogeneity, through enabling the design space exploration of multiple deployment configurations considering multi-cores and accelerator devices.