Concurrent Real Time
Powering Mission-Critical Applications

Today’s global industries are in need of advanced technology solutions that guarantee the execution of their mission-critical applications with marked precision and high performance. The demand is especially high in the aerospace & defense and automotive industries that deal with advanced weapons control, warfighter training, jet engine testing and autonomous vehicles. A hard real-time operating system (RTOS) is a necessity for running simulations with the minimum latency and high determinism needed in efficient prototyping, testing and quick time to market.

Providing such capabilities is Concurrent Real-Time, a global software and solutions company that supports advanced applications based on its RedHawk Linus real-time operating system. In addition to its top-of-the-line RTOS, Concurrent provides debugging and analysis tools, simulation modeling tools, integrated hardware platforms and professional services. These offerings translate to cost efficiency, improved productivity and robust simulation, allowing companies in the aerospace and automotive industries to gain an edge in the market.

Today, companies look for COTS systems to carry out simulation and testing in a reliable and flexible manner. “Our strong software development platform and expertise assists our customers in developing real-time solutions for a wide range of industry applications,” says Ken Jackson, President and CEO of Concurrent. The company builds RedHawk by incorporating its real-time constructs and patches into the latest Linux kernel from kernel.org. It then combines the hard real-time kernel with a customer-preferred Linux distribution such as CentOS or Ubuntu. RedHawk is theideal RTOS for time-critical x86 and ARM64 solutions.

RedHawk’s ability to leverage multi-core, multi-processor and virtualization technologies makes it suitable for both server-class and embedded applications.

To ensure application behavior and determinism during solution development, Concurrent offers NightStar, a non-intrusive debugging and analysis toolkit that allows users to detect faults in the system and patch code while the system is running. NightStar’s trace tool provides a graphical display of the runtime status of all threads, CPU cores, memory, and the interaction of the application with the RedHawk kernel. The NightStar application tuner allows fine-tuning of the system by shielding cores, migrating processes in real-time, and reprioritizing tasks.

For clients looking to create accurate simulations with access to thousands of I/O points, Concurrent offers its SIMulation Workbench (SimWB) modeling environment. SimWB delivers a complete framework for developing and executing real-time hardware-in-the-loop and man-in-the-loop simulations. Its powerful GUI allows users to conveniently configure, start, stop, record and play back simulation runs. SimWB allows complex simulations to be executed on a single multi-processor platform, thus eliminating the need for distributed, shared memory configurations. Its in-memory design optimizes performance and data conversion speed. SimWB supports multi-rate simulation and takes full advantage of multi-core platforms. SimWB runs models written in MATLAB/ Simulink and many other popular industry modeling tools.

For example, Concurrent assisted an automotive company in running their design models in real-time. With this new approach, the client was able to expedite the whole process of testing its vehicle models and gain feedback from the driver, resulting in lower cost and shorter development schedules. These savings in time are also leveraged by various Formula One teams who use RedHawk-powered simulations to test drive on virtual tracks and evaluate various aerodynamic packages in order to select the ideal option for the track. Many companies from the aerospace defense and manufacturing industries also benefit from Concurrent’s software engineering expertise and its 50 years of real-time experience.

In delivering its innovative high-performance real-time solutions, Concurrent has experienced a significant increase in revenues and is growing its business. Concurrent anticipates future growth in automotive test and electrical simulation industries with an emphasis on its FPGA-based solutions.