On October 9, 2009, the second project review meeting of the FP7 project "eMuCo" took place at the seat of the project coordinator in Bochum, Germany

The review meeting was preceded by a preparation meeting on October 8^th where the eMuCo consortium had the opportunity to further synchronize the many presentations and demonstrations prepared to show the advances made in eMuCo.

During the review meeting, the European Commission reviewers and the representatives of the eMuCo consortium analysed the technical progress and results of the project in relation to the contractual work plan as well as to the objectives of the project.

The meeting outcome was satisfactory and the consortium will be pleased to include the recommendations made by the reviewers in the future work of the project.

Project Review Dinner

The project review dinner was held at "Haus Herbede" on October 8^th. The eMuCo partners and reviewers tasted an exquisite dinner and enjoyed pleasant talks in a cozy environment the night previous to the review meeting.

Demo sessions at the Review Meeting

In the frame of the review meeting demo sessions were built-in to showcase the progress of the project. Four demos where showcased in these sessions:

First demo: eMuCo software platform basis on one core competitive IFX platform. It showed the performance of the eMuCo software platform on the X-GOLD(TM)618^TM SoC from Infineon (IFX), which is a HSDPA capable cellular platform employed in many high-end mobile phones. It therefore serves as a reference platform to evaluate the performance and limitations of the eMuCo software approach on a realistic, single core mobile phone platform. The one core reference platform actually consists of a highly integrated SoC with several cores but the computing system running all applications (modem and multimedia) in this demo uses only one ARM11. "The comparison of the performance figures of the X-Gold and Realview MPCore platforms enables us to assess the properties of a multi-core mobile phone platform", said Yang Xu, engineer in charge of the evaluation in Infineon. Explanatory poster of the demo can be found here.
Information about X-GOLD(TM)618^TM can be downloaded here.

Second demo: Service Contracts adapted to eMuCo. It consisted of a technical presentation of the role of the service contracts in the eMuCo software platform. Explanatory poster of the demo can be downloaded here.

Third demo: eMuCo software platform basis on multi-core ARM RealView evaluation board. This demonstrator aimed to show the main contributions of the eMuCo project to the platform of the future mobile devices. The demonstrator presents a control panel allowing activation and deactivation of the video transmission and reception. LTE stack and applications are executed in parallel on the multi-core and another panel visualizes their impact on core utilization and throughput. The demonstrator furthermore shows the possibility of distributing workloads among the available CPU cores. Explanatory poster of the demo can be downloaded here.

Fourth demo: Migrating Operating Systems on Big-Little Architectures for Energy Efficiency. It showed how the Operating System (OS) can be migrated between different cores on a Single-Chip Multi-Core (SMC) system, with special focus on Heterogeneous Multi-cores with Uniform ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) often referred to as Big-Little Architectures. The primary motivation for the OS Migration would be for saving power by moving the state from the Big core to the Little core and then switching the Big core off when it is not required. Thereby the system can achieve greater flexibility in terms of both high performance and low power. Explanatory poster of the demo can be downloaded here.