Physical simulation is a valuable tool inmany fields of engineering for the tasks of design, prototyping, and testing.General-purpose operating systems (GPOS) are designed for real-fast tasks, such as offline simulation of complex physical models that should finish as soon as possible. Interfacing hardware at a given rate (as in a hardware-in-the-loop test) requires instead maximizing time determinism, for which real-time operating systems (RTOS) are designed. In this paper, real-fast and real-time performance of RTOS andGPOS are comparedwhen simulatingmodels of high complexity with large time steps.This type of applications is usually present in the automotive industry and requires a good trade-off between real-fast and real-time performance. The performance of an RTOS and a GPOS is compared by running a tire model scalable on the number of degrees-of-freedom and parallel threads. The benchmark shows that the GPOS present better performance in real-fast runs but worse in real-time due to nonexplicit task switches and to the latency associated with interprocess communication (IPC) and task switch.

@Article\{GMGT14,
  author       = "Garre, Carlos and Mundo, Domenico and Gubitosa, Marco and Toso, Alessandro",
  title        = "Real-Time and Real-Fast Performance of General-Purpose and Real-Time Operating Systems in Multithreaded Physical Simulation of Complex Mechanical Systems",
  journal      = "Mathematical Problems in Engineering",
  number       = "1",
  volume       = "2014",
  pages        = "1-14",
  year         = "2014",
  note         = "Article ID 945850",
  url          = "http://gmrv.es/Publications/2014/GMGT14"
}