"We see various application areas for multifunctional and multitasking industrial-grade application servers," explains Christian Eder, Director Marketing at congatec. "As next-generation industrial controls are connected they need to interact with each other in real time. In many applications we also observe the need to implement vision-based AI. In addition, IIoT-based data exchange is required to monitor the distributed machinery in the various industrial fields. The demo of our industrial-grade application server platform for multiple real-time controls is qualified for exactly these applications."
"We clearly see a trend of workload consolidation all the way down to the machines on the factory floor" adds Gerd Lammers, CEO of Real-Time Systems. "Today's customers consolidate heterogeneous workloads like AI, Vision and secure gateways in parallel to hard real-time controls and Time Sensitive Networking (TSN). All that OEM engineers require to combine all these tasks in one system is a multi-core embedded server platform and a real-time hypervisor. All companies involved in our workload consolidation demo did an excellent job, and I am sure that there are quite a few industrial customers who will be watching with great interest what we are presenting at Embedded World."
The demo of the COM Express Type 6 based Intel Xeon E2 industrial-grade application server platform integrates three application-ready, preconfigured virtual machines. One operates a Basler vision camera, where the vision-based object recognition runs on Linux via the Intel OpenVino software and the AI algorithms are executed on an Intel Arria 10 FPGA card from Refexces. The two independent real-time partitions run real-time Linux to control the balance of an inverted pendulum in real-time. Visitors can try to disturb the balance of the pendulums - the system will react instantly and with real-time behavior to keep the pendulums in balance. To demonstrate the independence of these applications and the real-time behavior on a single server platform hosting several virtual machines, the Linux partition can be rebooted without any impact on the virtualized real-time system balancing the pendulums. All virtual machines are individually partitionable via the real-time hypervisor software from Real-Time Systems, providing perfectly tailored resources for the manifold real-time and non-real time tasks of next generation robotics, machinery and industrial controls integrated on one single industrial-grade application server platform.