DO-178C Certification of General-Purpose GPU Software: Review of Existing Methods and Future Directions

General-Purpose GPU software is considered for use in avionics to satisfy the increased computational requirements of future systems. Therefore, it needs to be certified following the DO-178C guidance as all airborne software. In this work, we review the existing methods in the literature, we analyse their advantages and disadvantages, and we discuss how they can be combined to obtain certification with lower effort and cost. Our focus is restricted on application-level software, under the premise that successful completion of verification of avionics graphics GPU software products has been demonstrated, so their GPU compiler has been considered acceptable for these already DO-178C certified products, or existing qualified GPU compilers exist. Finally, we discuss upcoming solutions for certified general purpose GPU computing.