Aim
Computers are increasingly as subcomponents in technical equipment where they must interact with and control external physical processes in real time. The course gives an introduction to how such computer systems work and gives practical experience from programming such systems.

Knowledge and understanding
For a passing grade the student must

• be able to determine appropriate software structure with emphasis on concurrent activities, based on application requirements including parallel and sequential courses of events.

• be familiar with and be able to describe how threads execute and are synchronized in a real-time system.

• be familiar with what causes deadlock and techniques for avoiding deadlock.

• be familiar with the most common techniques for scheduling threads and how scheduling analysis works.

Skills and abilities
For a passing grade the student must

• be able to design concurrent reactive software based on application requirements and prescribed interfaces to the environment.

• be able to formulate timing and resource requirements for a real-time system.

• be able to design and implement a multi-threaded control system such that given timing demands are met.

• be able to perform simple deadlock analysis for a small system of threads and resources.

• be able to perform scheduling analysis for a small system of threads.

• have experience from developing real-time software in project form.

Contents

• Examples of real-time systems and embedded systems.

• Basic concepts: concurrent processes, synchronization and communication, indivisible operations and mutual exclusion.

• Semaphores, monitors and message passing.

• Analysis of deadlock.

• Input and output. Interrupt handling.

• Timing, priorities, periodic processes.

• Overview of scheduling principles.

Literature
Literature provided by the department during the course.