Real Time Programming 1996

This volume contains papers from the IFAC Workshop on Real-Time Programming. The aim of the Workshop was to bring together academic practitioners and industrialists involved in this important and expanding area of interest in order to exchange experiences on recent advances in this field. Contents include: * DEPENDABILITY AND SAFETY FOR REAL TIME SYSTEMS * REAL-TIME PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES * SOFTWARE REQUIREMENT ENGINEERING * CONTROL SYSTEMS DESIGN * SOFTWARE DESIGN * SOFTWARE ENGINEERING AND COMPLEX ENGINEERINGSYSTEMS

Concurrency and distribution have become the dominant paradigm and concern in computer science. Despite the fact that much of the early research in object-oriented programming focused on sequential systems, objects are a natural unit of distribution and concurrency - as elucidated early on by research on the Actor model. Thus, models and theories of concurrency, the oldest one being Petri nets, and their relation to objects are an attractive topic of study. This book presents state-of-the-art results on Petri nets and concurrent object-oriented programming in a coherent and competent way. The 24 thoroughly reviewed and revised papers are organized in three sections. The first consists of long papers, each presenting a detailed approach to integrating Petri nets and object-orientation. Section II includes shorter papers with emphasis on concrete examples to demonstrate the approach. Finally, section III is devoted to papers which significantly build on the Actor model of computation.

Paperback. This volume contains the proceedings of the 21st IFAC/IFIP Workshop on Real Time Programming (WRTP'96) held in Gramado, Brazil on 4-6 November 1996. Over the years, this series of annual workshops has become an excellent forum for exchanging information on technological advances and practices in real time computing - a field that is rapidly becoming an essential enabling discipline in computer science and engineering.The technical programme of the workshop maintained the outstanding quality of the series and covered all the latest research and developments in scheduling, operating systems, communications, timing analysis, system development, databases, formal methods and applications. In addition to high quality papers, the programme featured three world class keynote speakers and some poster presentations. These proceedings, therefore, comprise 21 full papers, three keynote addresses and five short contributions.

Computers and their interactions are becoming the characteristic features of our time: Many people believe that the industrial age is going over into the information age. In the same way as life of the beginning of this century was dominated by machines, factories, streets and railways, the starting century will be characterised by computers and their networks. This change naturally affects also the institutions and the installations our lives depend upon: power plants, including nuclear ones, chemical plants, mechanically working factories, cars, railways and medical equipment; they all depend on computers and their connections. In some cases it is not human life that may be endangered by computer failure, but large investments; e. g. if a whole plant interrupts its production for a long time. In addition to loss of life and property one must not neglect public opinion, which is very critical in many countries against major technical defects. The related computer technology, its hardware, software and production process differ between standard applications and safety related ones: In the safety case it is normally not only the manufacturers and the customers that are involved, but a third party, usually an assessor, who is taking care of the public interest on behalf of a state authority. Usually safety engineers are in a better position than their colleagues from the conventional side, as they may spend more time and money on a particular task and use better equipment.

From Multicores and GPUs to Petascale. Parallel computing technologies have brought dramatic changes to mainstream computing the majority of todays PCs, laptops and even notebooks incorporate multiprocessor chips with up to four processors. Standard components are increasingly combined with GPUs Graphics Processing Unit, originally designed for high-speed graphics processing, and FPGAs Free Programmable Gate Array to build parallel computers with a wide spectrum of high-speed processing functions. The scale of this powerful hardware is limited only by factors such as energy consumption and thermal control. However, in addition to"

There are many books on computers, networks, and software engineering but none that integrate the three with applications. Integration is important because, increasingly, software dominates the performance, reliability, maintainability, and availability of complex computer and systems. Books on software engineering typically portray software as if it exists in a vacuum with no relationship to the wider system. This is wrong because a system is more than software. It is comprised of people, organizations, processes, hardware, and software. All of these components must be considered in an integrative fashion when designing systems. On the other hand, books on computers and networks do not demonstrate a deep understanding of the intricacies of developing software. In this book you will learn, for example, how to quantitatively analyze the performance, reliability, maintainability, and availability of computers, networks, and software in relation to the total system. Furthermore, you will learn how to evaluate and mitigate the risk of deploying integrated systems. You will learn how to apply many models dealing with the optimization of systems. Numerous quantitative examples are provided to help you understand and interpret model results. This book can be used as a first year graduate course in computer, network, and software engineering; as an on-the-job reference for computer, network, and software engineers; and as a reference for these disciplines.

Master the essentials of concurrent programming,including testingand debugging This textbook examines languages and libraries for multithreadedprogramming. Readers learn how to create threads in Java and C++,and develop essential concurrent programming and problem-solvingskills. Moreover, the textbook sets itself apart from othercomparable works by helping readers to become proficient in keytesting and debugging techniques. Among the topics covered, readersare introduced to the relevant aspects of Java, the POSIX Pthreadslibrary, and the Windows Win32 Applications ProgrammingInterface. The authors have developed and fine-tuned this book through theconcurrent programming courses they have taught for the past twentyyears. The material, which emphasizes practical tools andtechniques to solve concurrent programming problems, includesoriginal results from the authors' research. Chaptersinclude: * Introduction to concurrent programming * The critical section problem * Semaphores and locks * Monitors * Message-passing * Message-passing in distributed programs * Testing and debugging concurrent programs As an aid to both students and instructors, class libraries havebeen implemented to provide working examples of all the materialthat is covered. These libraries and the testing techniques theysupport can be used to assess student-written programs. Each chapter includes exercises that build skills in programwriting and help ensure that readers have mastered the chapter'skey concepts. The source code for all the listings in the text andfor the synchronization libraries is also provided, as well asstartup files and test cases for the exercises. This textbook is designed for upper-level undergraduates andgraduate students in computer science. With its abundance ofpractical material and inclusion of working code, coupled with anemphasis on testing and debugging, it is also a highly usefulreference for practicing programmers.