Architecture and Real-Time Systems (ARTS) Laboratory

Motivation

Measures are important as an interface between the computer engineer and the application designer. We also need tools to quantify those features of dependable performance which have the greatest impact on the application.

Measures already exist for non-real-time computers; however, measures for embedded systems are fundamentally different from these. The key parameter in our case is system response time, which is a complex function of a number of hardware and software parameters.

Here is our assessment of measurement tools that are currently available and why we consider them unsuitable for real-time applications.

Our tactic will be to identify generic attributes that are important to real-time dependability, assess the capability of the computer system in terms of these attributes, and using the information generated from these two steps, obtain the application-driven computer reliability.

A diagram that illustrates where our project lies in the tradeoff between generic and specific usage