Schedulable Services for Real-Time Embedded Applications in Virtual Machine Environment

Speaker:	Prof. Yann-Hang Lee
		Computer Science and Engineering Department
		Arizona State University

Title:		"Schedulable Services for Real-Time Embedded
		 Applications in Virtual Machine Environment"

Date:		Friday, 21 April 2006

Time:		3:00pm - 4:00pm

Venue:		Room 2302 (via lift nos. 17/18)
		HKUST

ABSTRACT:

Given the advantages of portability, compactness, efficiency, and
interoperatbility, the ideas of virtual execution systems, intermediate
safe languages, and language independent execution platforms have
fascinated system development for a long time. The trend of adopting
virtual execution systems to run machine-independent bytecodes on embedded
devices moves forward very quickly and spreads in very wide range of
application areas, including home appliances, building control, handheld
devices, and industry control.

To support real-time embedded applications, the existing VM
implementations, including JVM, .NET, and Mono, must be enhanced to
cooperate with constrained resources and timeliness. In this talk, we will
start with the basic concept of schedulable virtual machines. The
underline services provided by the virtual machines should be scheduled
similar to any application tasks and have a predictable and controllable
behavior. As a consequence, feasible scheduling models that co-schedule VM
service operations and application tasks together can be identified to
ensure timeliness of VM services and applications. We will then show a
prototype development for garbage collection and object persistence
service in Mono CLI environment. The experiment data suggests that the
services are able to get along with real-time applications because of
their controllable pause times and reasonable overheads.



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Biography:

Yann-Hang Lee received his Ph.D. degree in Computer, Information, and
Control Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, in
1984. From December 1984 to August 1988, he was a research staff member at
the Architecture Analysis and Design Group, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research
Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. He joined Computer and Information Sciences
Department, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, in 1988, and is
currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science and
Engineering, Arizona State University.

Dr. Lee's research interests are in the areas of real-time systems,
software engineering, sensor networks, and performance evaluation.  His
current research projects are focused on various aspects of real-time
systems and have been funded by NASA, FAA, DARPA, and NSF. Through the
collaboration with Honeywell International, United Technology Research
Center, Boeing, and Motorola Labs, he has participated in the research of
practical real-time application systems. He has published many technical
papers and co-edited two special issues of IEEE Proceedings in the subject
of real-time systems. In addition, he was a program co-chair for the
Real-time Systems Symposium, 1995, and conference co-chair for the
Real-time Systems Symposium, 1996.