Safetycritical tagged news

In a world where AI, HPC and Safety-Critical acceleration is shifting toward heterogeneous architectures that integrate processors with different architectures from multiple vendors, the need for seamless interoperability and shared open standards has never been more critical. That’s why the UXL Foundation (Unified Acceleration) and the Khronos Group have entered into a liaison agreement to help accelerate the evolution of open accelerated heterogeneous programming.

In this EE Times Europe article, Neil Trevett describes how the need for graphics and compute acceleration in embedded markets is growing. Cameras and sensor arrays are increasingly central to many use cases in diverse industries, ranging from automotive to industrial, and are generating increasingly rich data streams that require sophisticated processing. At the same time, advanced user interfaces are being developed using high-quality 3D graphics and even augmented-reality technology. However, the need to deploy accelerated processing, combined with the complexities of safety-critical certification, has created a confusing landscape of processors, accelerators, compilers, APIs, and libraries. That has driven up integration costs for embedded accelerators, which in turn has constrained innovation and time-to-market efficiencies.

Open standards have an important role in helping hardware and software vendors navigate this complex technology environment. Acceleration standards for the embedded market can enable cross-platform software reusability, decouple software and hardware development for easier deployment and integration of new components, provide cross-generation reusability, and facilitate field upgradability. Such standards reduce costs, shorten time to market, and lower the barriers to using advanced techniques such as inferencing and vision acceleration in compelling real-world products.

Khronos Group President, Neil Trevett, shares how open standards have an important role mitigating the complexities of safety-critical certification in a confusing landscape of processors, accelerators, compilers, APIs, and libraries, that drive up integration costs for embedded accelerators, which in turn has constrained innovation and time-to-market efficiencies.

AUTOSAR™ (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture) and The Khronos® Group have signed a Memorandum of Understanding and entered into a collaboration liaison to foster synergy between the two organizations to encourage standardization in the field of Automotive and Future Intelligent Mobility. This joint technical collaboration between AUTOSAR and Khronos is intended to coordinate common requirements and developments with a focus on accelerated graphics and computing in safety critical markets.

Participation is free and open to all safety-critical markets. All participants will be able to discuss use cases and requirements for a unified parallel programming interface for C++ to accelerate market growth. This API would be designed to reduce development and certification costs in safety-critical markets where using the SYCL higher-level programming model could improve programming productivity. If the Exploratory Forum reaches a significant consensus then Khronos will work to initiate a formal Working Group to develop SYCL SC specifications.

The Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Forum (KSCAF) has chosen the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) licensing model for the open sourcing of the KSCAF Requirements and Guidelines document repositories. KSCAF made the switch to encourage participation in a wider set of domains by making the documents publicly available. Non-Khronos members are allowed to provide expert feedback and high-quality content.

Want to get involved?

Experienced practitioners in the field of safety critical system design are invited to apply for Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Forum membership.  If interested, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) contact information, a short history of your experience, and how you feel you could help us set the future direction of safety critical APIs.

Open standards are opening up supply options for OEMs and Tier 1s in the automotive industry while also satisfying safety concerns. lya Rudkin, chair of the Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Forum discusses why open standards are increasingly important in safety critical applications in the automotive market. Comprising hardware SoC designers, software developers with safety critical experience, cybersecurity experts, and safety functional managers in various safety critical domains, the forum has combined a wealth of graphic and data compute expertise with functional safety experts. For experienced practitioners in the field of safety critical system design who would like to participate in the advent of industry safety standards for next-generation automotive, Khronos invites them to learn more about the Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Forum here.

Airbus Defence and Space and Core Avionics & Industrial Inc. announced today, at Aerospace TechWeek in Munich, a technology partnership to enable the use of GPU compute in airborne systems and applications that require the highest RTCA DO-178C/EUROCAE ED-12C DAL A safety certifications. Based on the use of CoreAVI’s platforms for safety certifiable applications, including its VkCore™ SC Vulkan®-based compute driver architecture, the two companies will work together to fully define and be ready to deliver software and systems that perform safety critical GPU compute operations to enable the most advanced autonomous systems and other avionics applications that can take advantage of GPU compute functions. CoreAVI chairs Khronos’ Vulkan SC Working Group and is driving forward new standards to support true GPU compute capabilities using graphics processors.

Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group will be chairing a discussion group at Operational Safe Systems for Level 5 Automation (OSS5) on February 28th in San Francisco. Discussions will explore if existing open standards a reasonable starting point for safety critical APIs. The newly formed Vulkan SC Working Group makes a compelling starting point for safety certifiable access to GPU acceleration for graphics and compute.

The Khronos Group today announces the creation of the Vulkan Safety Critical Working Group, to enable safety critical industries to take advantage of advancements in GPU graphics and compute acceleration, and display control, at the highest levels of safety integrity. Safety critical graphics are a key component for industries such as automotive, avionics, medical and energy. As display requirements become more advanced, safety critical graphics APIs must evolve to meet the industries’ needs. Now, automotive and other industries are seeking advanced GPU graphics, compute and display functionality that can be deployed in safety critical systems. In response to this industry demand, this new Khronos Working Group will create open, royalty-free API standards based on the existing Vulkan API specification to enable safety critical industries to utilize advanced graphics and compute acceleration. To best suit these market’s needs, the new API will aim to be compatible with industry standards for safety critical software, such as RTCA DO-178C Level A / EASA ED-12C Level A (avionics); FACE (Future Airborne Capability Environment) (avionics); and ISO 26262 ASIL D (automotive).

The Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Forum (KSCAF) gathers safety critical experts from a wide range of disciplines, such as transportation and medical imaging, who have experience developing software and products to widely adopting standards. The goal of KSCAF is to develop guidelines and recommendations for engineers creating open standard APIs within Khronos, and elsewhere in the industry, so that those standards can help streamline the product safety certification process. The Forum’s chair looks back on a successful 2018, with plans to expand in the new year ahead.

In April, Khronos introduced the Safety Critical Advisory Forum in response to developers’ growing concerns and demands of functional safety standards on hardware and software. The advice and support that the forum provides to Khronos Working Groups directly contributes to the creation of SC APIs. Members and non-members can contribute in the forum, this blog outlines the benefits of participation.

As technology around artificial intelligence and autonomous driving advances, the need for safety critical systems also grows. Khronos Group has created a Safety Critical Advisory Forum and invites functional safety experts to join the group to advise and help develop open standards for the safety critical domain. By contributing your expertise to Khronos’ safety-critical work, you will enable Khronos and its API designers to deliver safety-critical APIs for a safer autonomous world.

Codeplay is pleased to announce it has joined the MISRA working group for C++ to help move the standards forward to support C++ '11 and beyond, enabling software developers to build safety critical systems for automotive. "The goal for us is ultimately to have a Safety Critical Heterogeneous C++ language that is compatible with ISO standards and Khronos open standards." Illya Rudkin from Codeplay is chair of the Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Panel.