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Liu, C. L.

Publications and source records attributed to Liu, C. L..

PERTS: A Prototyping Environment for Real-Time Systems

PERTS is a prototyping environment for real-time systems. It is being built incrementally and will contain basic building blocks of operating systems for time-critical applications, tools, and performance models for the analysis, evaluation and measurement of real-time systems and a simulation/emulation environment. It is designed to support the use and evaluation of new design approaches, experimentations with alternative system building blocks, and the analysis and performance profiling of prototype real-time systems.

Liu, Jane W. S.

PERTS: A Prototyping Environment for Real-Time Systems

We discuss an ongoing project to build a Prototyping Environment for Real-Time Systems, called PERTS. PERTS is a unique prototyping environment in that it has (1) tools and performance models for the analysis and evaluation of real-time prototype systems, (2) building blocks for flexible real-time programs and the support system software, (3) basic building blocks of distributed and intelligent real time applications, and (4) an execution environment. PERTS will make the recent and future theoretical advances in real-time system design and engineering readily usable to practitioners. In particular, it will provide an environment for the use and evaluation of new design approaches, for experimentation with alternative system building blocks and for the analysis and performance profiling of prototype real-time systems.

Liu, Jane W. S.

Issues in the Imprecise Computation Approach to Fault Tolerance

The imprecise computation technique can be used in a natural way to enhance fault tolerance. By providing a usable, approximate result whenever a failure or overload prevent the system from producing the desired, precise result, we can increase the availability of data and services, reduce the need for error-recovery operations, and minimize the costs in replication. This paper describes the domain-specific fault tolerance mechanisms that are needed to support the provision and correct usage of imprecise results for several representative application domains. The elements of an application-domain-independent architecture that can effectively integrate these domain-specific mechanisms are also described.

Liu, Jane W. S.

Scheduling algorithms for multiprogramming in a hard-real-time environment.

The problem of multiprogram scheduling on a single processor is studied from the viewpoint of the characteristics peculiar to the program functions that need guaranteed service. It is shown that an optimum fixed priority scheduler possesses an upper bound to processor utilization which may be as low as 70 percent for large task sets. It is also shown that full processor utilization can be achieved by dynamically assigning priorities on the basis of their current deadlines. A combination of these two scheduling techniques is also discussed.

Liu, C. L.