Evaluating industrial applicability of virtualization on a distributed multicore platform

Adoption of virtualization technology has been limited in industrial automation due to unavailability of mature solutions, and strict timing requirements of control systems. However, current advancement in Virtual Monitoring Machine, multicore technology, virtualization extension and network virtualization has led to increased interest of virtualization in industrial automation. So far, many related research are focused on maximizing CPU and I/O utilization, and optimization applicable to soft realtime systems (i.e., outside industrial automation domain), e.g., multimedia applications. In this research, we make use of QoS for CPU, memory and network bandwidth in pursuit of high speed and predictability on a distributed multicore platform which is constructed entirely from open source products. We evaluate the platform for latency and jitter, network throughput and CPU computation load. Finally, we analyze the result for applicability in industrial control domain.