The European Framework Programmes have strong emphasis on complex real-time embedded systems. These systems include increasing portions of software applications, and they are subject to constraints on performance, energy consumption and unit cost. These applications are often expressed as multiple concurrent threads, and this shows a high potential of exploitations. In fact, their thread- and data-level parallelism can be mapped as a hybrid combination onto state-of-the-art multi -processor architectures, which also feature low-power data-parallel operations. Examples are the Philips Nexperia, ST Nomadic and TI OMAP platforms. Unfortunately, current design methodologies do not explore the trade-offs offered by the above mapping, especially in dynamic contexts where tasks are frequently created and completed.We propose to research a methodology to fill this gap. It would allow better exploitation of hardware resources and eliminate the overheads of the suboptimal best-effort operating system and middleware solutions used today. IMEC (Belgium) is a leading research centre in Europe for training PhD students, researchers and companies, with a wide expertise both in task concurrency (more than 20 international conference/book/journal papers in 04/ 05) and energy -efficient architectures (dozens of papers). The system design technology group has the right background to tackle this challenging research and to provide the right training context.The candidate is finalizing his PhD from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in the field of performance estimation for embedded software, and he has recently cooperated with IMEC, exposing the potential of the proposed research. These experiences provide him with a solid background for the proposed work. The fellowship will enable the candidate to further develop the joint work, strengthening the research position of Europe in a field which is strategic for its technological future.