Memory Management for Hard Real-time Systems

Jan Vitek
Purdue University

Abstract:
The Java programming language has become a viable platform
for real-time systems with applications in avionics, shipboard
computing, audio processing, industrial control and the
financial sector. High performance real-time Java virtual
machines (RT JVMs) are now available from multiple vendors.

One of the main challenges in using a high level programming
language, such as Java or C#, to program hard-real time
system is to deal with heap-allocated data structures. Traditional
techniques such as pre-allocation and object pooling are
ill-suited to modern software engineering practices. In this
talk I describe two approaches that we have experimented
with in the context of the Ovm real-time Java virtual machine:
region-based allocation and real-time garbage collection. I
will demonstrate that for tasks which can tolerate latencies
on the order of 1 millisecond real-time collectors are
perfectly adequate, but, in order to obtain sub-milliseconds
latencies other approaches are required.  The talk will
also give an overview of new results in non-blocking
concurrent garbage collection.


About the Speaker: 
Jan Vitek is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at
Purdue University. He leads the Secure Software Systems lab.
He obtained his PhD from the University of Geneva in 1999, and a
MSc from the University of Victoria in 1995. His research
interests include programming language, virtual machines,
mobile code, software engineering and information security.