For many years, real-time control software, whether running on a dedicated controller or an industrial PC, operated on a single CPU core. The runtime scheduler could precisely calculate scan times, and the engineer’s mental model of “one processor, one control loop” held true.

In this episode of Control Intelligence, written by contributing editor Joey Stubbs, editor in chief Mike Bacidore shares how to handle determinism, jitter and load balancing in multicore control architectures.