Highlights from HIS 2018

Rapita Systems was delighted to attend the High Integrity Software (HIS) Conference in Bristol last week.

Now in its fifth year, HIS aims to share challenges, best practice and experience between software engineering practitioners.

SYSGO Business Coffee

As part of the run-up to the big day, our partners at SYSGO hosted a ‘business coffee’ on the evening before the event proper. The idea being for delegates to network and listen to some short presentations delivered by SYSGO and their preferred partners.

During this event, Rapita’s Business Development Manager, Dr Hashem Ghazzawi, described how our Multicore Timing Analysis Solution can provide evidence on the timing behavior of multicore systems, quantify interference channels, and solve key challenges faced by the migration to use of multicore systems for critical embedded software. His presentation on 'Multicore Timing Analysis - The Rapita Approach' was given alongside others from CoreAVI, ANSYS and Curtiss Wright.

Talking point: Multicore systems in the high integrity software world

Hashem's presentation set the tone for the conference as a whole, which included many discussions about the challenges of testing multicore systems, including a talk by Dan Iorga from Imperial College on 'Multi-core Interference Tuning and Analysis'.

Of particular interest for the aerospace delegates was the topic of satisfying CAST-32A objectives on integrating multicore software into safety critical DO-178C projects. Timing analysis and identifying and quantifying interference channels were the most popular topics.

Many of the main conference presentations were focused on the autonomous driving industry and the software powering these intelligent machines of tomorrow. These machines use powerful hardware to execute the complex software that ensures their safe operation. The integrity of multicore was a major talking point for automotive delegates, who are asking the big questions about government legislation, self-regulation and the certification of machines capable of doing great damage when things go wrong.

RapiTetris is reborn

On a lighter note, Rapita was very pleased to unveil their new and improved RapiTetris arcade box!

RapiTetris, based on a modified version of Tetris integrated with RapiCover, lets players collect and view structural coverage data while they play. The challenge is to try and achieve full MC/DC coverage of the game code within a 5 minute period.

The new retro styling proved to be a big hit, with many intrigued delegates taking part and testing their code coverage (and Tetris) skills!

Closing remarks

HIS Bristol 2018 was a great event with its largest delegate count to date – around 160. We would like to thank Tom Anderson at CSR Events and the rest of the team behind HIS, our partners at SYSGO and AdaCore and all the fellow attendees who made the day so enjoyable. See you all next year.