Time:
MWF
Location:
104 Harvey R. Bright Bldg
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Instructor: |
Teaching
Assistant: |
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Riccardo Bettati |
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519C Harvey R. Bright Bldg 979-862-4535 |
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e-mail: bettati@cs.tamu.edu |
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e-mail: g0c7670@cs.tamu.edu |
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Office hours: MW 1:30pm-2:30pm, or by appointment |
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Office hours: |
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Tests |
Projects |
News
Course Overview
The advent of integrated services over many forms of networks
(Voice-over-IP, sensor networks, multimedia wireless services, etc...) and many
forms of multimedia computing, together with the increased use of commercial
off-the-shelf technology in embedded systems have raised the general awareness
for real-time issues. From being traditionally confined to areas of embedded
and/or control systems, where timing constraints have played an important role
for a long time, real-time issues now find more and more the interest of the
computing community at large. In accordance to these developments, we see
real-time facilities increasingly becoming part of general-purpose computing
equipment.
This course is designed to provide the student with the theoretical
foundations for the design and synthesis of real-time systems and applications;
it also presents criteria used to evaluate and validate such systems.
Reading material will expose the student to a small fraction of the
classical literature in this area and to recent developments, the latter mostly
in the communication area. This course is introductory in nature, and will not have a strong research component to it.
Prerequisites
I will assume that you have a solid
background in operating systems
and networks, and a good notion
of algorithms (if NP
completeness is a new concept to you, please stay away from this course; I mean
it) and basic queuing theory. Please be
aware that the material in this course is very dense, and you won't be able to
find much time to develop the required skills on the side.
Material Covered in this Course
Real-time computing means computing so that things get done in time. We will
therefore devote much time to how to get things done in time (scheduling) and
how to validate whether things will be done in time (schedulability analysis).
We will then study how operating systems must be designed to support real-time
computing, and how some of them are not. Finally, we will devote some time on
real-time communication, and how to get it to work in terms of scheduling,
architectures, and protocols.
Sometimes it is not possible to get everything to in time all the time. Nevertheless, you would like to give guarantees
about how often you can get things done in time (probabilistic – or statistical
– guarantees). We will study how to formulate such guarantees, and how to
analyze systems whether they meet such guarantees.
If time allows, we will study some deterministic queuing theory. The
particular flavor covered in this class will be Network Calculus, which will
give you a rather general framework to analyze network elements and their
deterministic services in internetworks. Be aware that this part of the course
will be quite theoretical.
First Part (Real-Time Systems)
Second Part (Network Calculus)
Required Reading
The material covered in the first part of the course follows very closely
the textbook Real-Time
Systems by Jane
W.S. Liu at
The second portion of the course will follow the tutorial: Network Calculus: A Theory of
Deterministic Queuing Systems for the Internet by J.-Y. LeBoudec and Patrick Thiran. This book appeared as Springer Verlag Lecture
Notes in Computer Science (No. 2050), but is available in PDF form on the
web as well, at this
location. (This part of the course may change. Refrain from
purchasing the book or print the PDF file for now. We may not get to this part of the course.)
Homeworks
We will have a small number of homeworks, which will give you the opportunity
to play around with some of the material covered in class.
Exams
We will have two tests, one for each part of the course. These tests will be
rather short, in-class, open-book. The midterm exam will tentatively be held on
October 15, in class. A second (minor)
exam will tentatively be held on December 6, in class.
Reading Assignment
By mid-semester, you will be asked to select a small number of papers from recent proceedings of the IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium and the IEEE Real-Time Technology and Applications Symposium and to write a critical review of these papers. Details about this assignment will follow. Check the News portion of this web site.
Projects
An important part of this class will be a term project. In a few weeks I will
be distributing a list of smaller research problems. In addition, I will make
available a Request for Solutions. Students can then choose to either attempt
to solve a research problem or respond to the Request for Solutions.
Assessment Method
Ideally, grades will be assigned along the following lines:
Last
modified: 9/28/2004
12:20 AM