On Model-Based Analysis and Implementation Synthesis of Real-Time Embedded Software

Speaker:	Dr. Zonghua Gu
		University of Virginia

Title:		"On Model-Based Analysis and Implementation Synthesis
		 of Real-Time Embedded Software"

Date:		Wednesday, 27 April 2005

Time:		11:00 am - 12 noon

Venue:		Room 3301 (via lift nos. 17/18)
		HKUST

ABSTRACT:

As real-time embedded (RTE) software becomes increasingly complex, the
main concern of an embedded software engineer is no longer to optimize
performance at low levels of coding, but to ensure high-level correctness
and maintainability at the expense of some performance loss. Model-Based
Software Development aims to elevate the level of abstraction from writing
code to building models that generate code, and enable analysis of system
properties at early design stages. One common interaction style for
large-scale distributed RTE software is asynchronous message passing
between components with ports. As part of the DARPA Model-Based
Integration of Embedded Software project, an integrated toolset for design
and analysis of this class of software has been developed collaboratively
by researchers from multiple institutions, with avionics mission computing
from Boeing as an application example. I first discuss scalable
lightweight static analysis techniques developed as part of the toolset
for verification of the software design models. I then address the problem
of implementation synthesis, that is, given a logical software design
model, how to synthesize a multi-threaded implementation that runs on a
target hardware platform and satisfies timing constraints. Commercial code
generators generate functional code, but leave the choice of concurrency
and multi-threading strategies to the engineer. I discuss real-time
scheduling and design space exploration techniques for implementation
synthesis. Experimental evaluation shows that our techniques result in
high-quality multi-threaded implementations within reasonable running
times of the optimization algorithm.


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Biography:

Zonghua Gu received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering
from the University of Michigan in July 2004, and has been working as a
post-doctoral researcher at the University of Virginia since then. His
research interests are in the areas of real-time embedded systems and
software engineering.