In today’s digitalized production environments, large amounts of machine data need to be collected and processed to support manufacturers in analyzing and improving their systems and processes. The data typically comes from a large variety of machines and a range of software that is responsible for different functions within the machines.
Many companies are currently looking for ways to decrease the number of PLC hardware and industrial PCs (IPCs) needed to run their machines to save cost and mitigate the effects of the chip shortage. This can be done by virtualizing hardware and running it alongside other applications on one powerful host computer. Furthermore, this enables the use of legacy software on newer hardware with state-of-the-art security features.
TTTech Industrial’s edge computing platform Nerve helps manufacturers to move their machines’ control logic from dedicated PLC hardware to standard IPCs where it is run safely in Docker containers and virtual machines. To support this, Nerve uses the open-source ACRN™ hypervisor for running real-time control in a virtualized environment.
In a whitepaper, TTTech Industrial compiled the results of a test series that benchmarked the real-time performance of ACRNTM on Nerve. The whitepaper is available as a free download here.
