We are excited to announce that the LibreRT project will be featured in two presentations at major international conferences this May. These appearances mark an important moment for the project as we approach its conclusion and share the results and lessons learned with the broader research community.
LibreRT at ACM Computing Frontiers 2026 — Catania, Italy (May 19–21)
The 23rd ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers (CF’26) will take place in Catania, Sicily, Italy. This year, CF’26 features a Special Session on Collaborative Projects, aimed at increasing the visibility of ongoing research and development efforts funded by agencies worldwide and creating a forum for collaboration. LibreRT has been accepted for presentation in this session.
In the paper “LibreRT: Portable Heterogeneous Real-Time Programming for the Embedded Computing Continuum”, authored by Biagio Cosenza, Federico Terraneo, Giovanni Agosta, Lorenzo Carpentieri, Daniele Cattaneo, Mohammad VazirPanah, and Niccolò Nicolosi, we will present the full scope of the project: its goals, its methodology, its scientific achievements, and the lessons we have learned along the way.
The presentation will cover the three major pillars of LibreRT’s contributions. On the programming model side, we will describe how we extended the SYCL standard with real-time capabilities — including kernel-level priority scheduling and preemptive multitasking — and with approximate computing techniques through SYprox. On the operating system front, we will present the concept of fluid kernels, a novel kernel architecture implemented in the Miosix RTOS that blurs the traditional boundary between kernel and user space, achieving significant performance and code size advantages over both Linux and FreeRTOS on embedded hardware. We will also discuss the approximate computing and autotuning layer, which combines precision tuning and kernel perforation to meet real-time constraints.
Importantly, we will also share the lessons learned from the project: that SYCL is suitable not only for high-performance computing but also for tiny microcontrollers; that combining multiple approximation techniques outperforms relying on any single one; and that portability across GPU vendors — from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA down to embedded GPUs — remains a practical challenge that SYCL addresses effectively, though programmers must remain aware of differences in compiler maturity and backend support.
SYrtos at IWOCL 2026 — Heilbronn, Germany (May 6–8)
Just two weeks earlier, the LibreRT project will also be present at the 14th International Workshop on OpenCL and SYCL (IWOCL ’26) in Heilbronn, Germany. IWOCL is the premier venue for research and development around the OpenCL and SYCL standards, and we are proud to contribute to this year’s strong program.
Biagio Cosenza will present the paper “SYrtos: Extending SYCL for Real-Time Programming”, co-authored with Giovanni De Pierro, Federico Terraneo, Daniele Cattaneo, and Giovanni Agosta. SYrtos introduces a set of extensions to the SYCL execution model that bring real-time support to heterogeneous programming. The key idea is to add the ability to specify priorities for queues and kernels, coupled with task preemption, so that different applications can be co-scheduled on the same hardware while meeting real-time guarantees.
What makes SYrtos especially relevant to the LibreRT vision is its portability across the embedded computing continuum: the specification is designed for implementation on platforms ranging from microcontrollers running dedicated real-time operating systems — such as Miosix on a Raspberry Pi RP2040 — to more powerful Linux-based systems with multi-core CPUs. The paper presents a proof-of-concept implementation on top of POSIX threads for both Linux and the Miosix RTOS, along with preliminary experimental results demonstrating the feasibility of the approach on both an Intel multi-core CPU and a resource-constrained microcontroller.
The SYrtos presentation is scheduled for Thursday, May 7, during the morning session, alongside other exciting talks on SYCL compilation, GPU safety, and performance portability.
A Busy and Exciting Spring Ahead
These two presentations are the result of months of collaborative work between the University of Salerno and Politecnico di Milano, the two research units that make up the LibreRT consortium. As the project approaches its final phase, we are thrilled to bring our findings to the attention of two complementary communities: the broad, interdisciplinary computing systems community at CF, and the specialized heterogeneous programming community at IWOCL.
The LibreRT project is funded under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), call for tender No. 104 published on 02/02/2022 by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR), funded by the European Union – Next Generation EU, Mission 4, Component 1, CUP D53D23008590001 and CUP D53D23008600006.