The main goal of the THERMAC project was to optimize thermal properties of heterogeneous multi-core systems on chip (MPSoC) for use in the next generation of small aircraft transportation (SAT) systems. The focus was on software-based resource management techniques.

The main result is an optimization-based method for constructing off-line ARINC-653 schedules that takes advantage of the experimentally measured power profiles of individual tasks running on different CPU microarchitectures (big-LITTLE) or GPUs and can produce a schedule with lowest chip temperature. Best-effort workload is best handled when the off-line schedule is modified at runtime by an online policy that responds to unpredictable events (e.g., increase in ambient temperature). The online policy should be chosen depending on the effort one wants to put into the development. Using the DVFS throttling policy provides good results with little effort. Thermal mode changes require more effort, but can satisfy any optimization goal.

The partners of CTU were Honeywell and ISEP, Portugal.