PURPOSE
The main objective of this course is to study the design and implementation issues involved in real-time computing systems. We are especially interested in looking at the following issues: Scheduling and resource management to ensure that timing requirements are met, Operating systems for predictable operations in a complex and unpredictable environment with distributed and multiprocessor systems, Real-time communication to support real-time traffic in satisfying timing constraints of individual messages, Fault tolerance to ensure adequate reliability and timeliness in spite of failures, and Real-time databases to support time-constrained access to data that has temporal validity.
INTENDED AUDIENCE:
This course is intended for students with a mature understanding of operating systems and data communications and gives them an opportunity to integrate their knowledge in the exciting field of real-time systems. It is also useful for practitioners. CS471 and CS555 will be prerequisites.
LAB FACILITIES
Much of the programming and experimental work will be done on PCs with QNX Real-time operating system. It is also possible to do some experimentation using Sun Workstations.
TEXTBOOK/READINGS
Sang H. Son, Advances in Real-time systems, Prentice-Hall, 1995.
The text will be supplemented with papers from several technical journals and conference proceedings. The papers will be made available before they are discussed.
TOPICS:
1. Overview of Issues in RT OS 2. Study of RTOS: HARTOS, CHAOS, Spring kernel, Maruti 3. Overview of issues in Real-time Communications 4. Study of RT Com.: Tenet, Token ring algorithms, GRMS, Ethernet and Fieldbus. 5. An Overview of issues in RT Scheduling 6. Study of RT Scheulers: rate-monotoni, Slack stealing, etc. 7. Overview of Real-time Programming languages and Design tools 8. RT P/L: TCEL, RT Euclid and PEARL 9. Overview of Fault Tolerance and Architecture for RT 10. Real-time Databases