Real-Time Laboratory

The laboratory resources available until now allowed us to offer the real-time instruction (CS450) within the constraints of "soft" real-time. The implementation platform has been a network of Sun workstations with simulated external sources of data and interrupts. The students worked on a semester long team project collecting requirements, building a requirements and specification document, preparing the design and implementing software capable of acquiring the external data and interrupts, reacting to user input, and gen erating output conforming to pre-defined timing specifications. The design allowed exploration of such topics as intertask communication, device drivers, and interface with the operating system software. The implementation language was Ada with its tasking and run-time libraries fully supporting the course material. Examples of developed projects are a "dog fight" aviation video game, a reconfigurable aircraft instrument panel, and a program for monitoring airport ground traffic from a GPS feed.

During the Fall of 1995 Computer Science department moved into the new Science and Technology Building. The department is operating a Personal Software laboratory (with 60 UNIX workstations for individual work), Team Software laboratory (with 8 workstations for team work), Advanced Systems laboratory (for a research work), and the Real-Time Software to support the hardware course sequence. In addition to digital trainers, microprocessor boards, and simulation multimedia tools, we plan to use dedicated hardware with real-time operating systems, real-time development tools, and real-time data feeds from university aviation equipment (aircraft GPS, avionics, weather, flight simulators).

In the real-time laboratory we have both DOS/Windows (4 stations) and UNIX (1 Sun and 2 IBM workstations) hardware platforms dedicated to be used in the LAN with the external hardware (VME, DSP, data acquisition boards) and real-time development software. The Sun workstation is an IPX model with a Powerup CPU chip upgrade, 32 megabytes of memory and a color monitor, and each IBM workstation is an RS/6000 with 64 megabytes of memory and a color monitor. The DOS/Windows stations will have installed Lynx and QNX real-time operating systems. We have also Real-Time Analysis Toolset, and data acquisition, control, and simulation software. In the four RT development layers we need to have:


* specification/design tools, code generators, compilers, interface
* crosscompilers, loaders, debugging and emulating software
* real-time kernels for host and target systems
* target computers with diagnostic software running on the host
* data acquisition/processing boards

We are in process of acquiring UNIX based real-time development system to be run from the Sun and IBM RS6000 workstations connected to target boards in VME standards.

The lab currently is used by the Microprocessor class (CS372), and by students taking computer applications classes with a local network experiments. In the future the laboratory will be used for such courses as: Computer Organisation, Interfacing, Distributed Computing, Computer Architecture, Networking, etc.

Additionally, we have installed four Silicon Graphics Indigo Workstations, to be used jointly with Math Department for visualisation and graphics software.

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