Computer Science 589-4
Real-Time Systems

Fall 2005

T 8:30-11:00am, Speare Conference Room

 

Instructor: Dr. Xiao Qin

 Speare 146, 505-5902, xqin@cs.nmt.edu

Office hours: Tuesday 2:00-4:00pm

TA: Tao Xie

109 Speare Building - 505-5127 xietao@cs.nmt.edu

 Office hours: Friday 3:00-5:00pm

                                General Information | Announcements | Syllabus | Assignments | Projects | Lectures 

Announcements

  • Assignment 2 is now available. [Posted Monday 10/31/2005]  
  • Assignment 1 is now available. [Posted Wednesday 9/14/2005] 
  • Guide for Writing Project Proposals is available. [Posted Thursday 8/25/2005]
  • Proposal deadline: Must be received no later than 5:00 p.m. Monday, 19 September 2005. Proposal submitted in whole or in part by electronic media (email, disk, etc.) will not be accepted. [Posted Sunday 8/21/2005]
  • Projects is now available. [Posted Sunday 8/21/2005]
  • The webpage of CS 589-4 is launched. [Posted Thursday 4/28/2005]

Course Information

Real-time systems have to respond to external events within bounded interval of times defined by the systems external environments. Real-time systems can be classified into two camps: hard real-time or soft real-time. Most hard real-time systems are embedded systems, requiring a guarantee that all hard real-time tasks complete within specified deadlines. Conversely, soft real-time systems are less restrictive than hard real-time systems. Soft real-time systems are penalized by how much they miss deadlines.

This course, which builds on students' prior knowledge of operating systems, will address various issues of designing and validating real-time systems. The focus of the course will be on understanding timing effects in software, and approaches to designing software in a way to predict and control times at which actions are performed. The course will emphasize basic principles of real-time systems and, therefore, students will be gaining skills needed to extend existing methods in real-time systems and develop new techniques. 

The course will be research intensive, aiming at deriving practical and achievable ground rules for real-time systems design. Graduate students are expected to do an extra project including a written report and an in-class presentation on a topic to be arranged with the instructor. The project will be optional for undergraduates. However, extra credit will be awarded to undergraduate students who have completed the project. You will be expected to collaborate with other students toward the completion of the research project related to real-time systems.  

Students who have completed this course should be capable of doing the following:

  • classify and formulate hard and soft timing requirements of computing systems
  • understand the proofs of the fundamental theorems and corollaries of deadline and fixed priority real-time scheduling techniques
  • use schedulability analysis in the context of deadline and fixed-priority approaches
  • select an appropriate software architecture and combination of scheduling techniques to guarantee an array of timing requirements
  • implement a set of tasks with periodic and aperiodic timing requirements
  • estimate the execution time of a piece of code
  • modify scheduling algorithms in a real-time kernel
  • evaluate performance of an operating system for real-time applications

Topics Covered  (These topics may change)

  • Introduction to real-time systems.
  • Performance measures for real-time systems.
  • Task allocation and scheduling techniques.
  • Power and energy issues in real-time systems.
  • Communications algorithms.
  • Fault tolerance and reliability evaluation. 

Prerequisite: CS 325 Principles of Operating Systems

Office Hours: Dr. Qin will have office hours on Tuesday at 2:00-4:00p in his office (Speare 146). 

                        To get the most out of office hours, it is recommended to send an email in advance.

Textbooks:  

  • Jane W. S. Liu,  "Real-Time Systems," by Prentice Hall, 2000, ISBN: 0-13-099651-3.

    • Resources

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