Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat – Present holder of the Professorship of Computer Science 4 (Distributed Systems and Operating System) at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany)
Presentation at III Multicore World
Embedded Computing Systems in the Multi-Core Era
Prof. Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat, FAU
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Oversimplified, an embedded system is a computerized product in the broadest sense. Given such a very general interpretation, embedded systems appear almost everywhere in our life. This holds for any kind of consumer electronics, medical devices, or vehicles but also water- and aircrafts culminating in complex control systems for large industrial facilities or public services. From the technological point of view, embedded systems are assembled from varied-size micro-controllers, signal processors, common processors, or a mixture out of it. In most of these cases, multi-core technology founds the basis as a characteristic trait that can hardly be circumvented – much as one would like. In terms of hardware, the chips form a homogeneous or heterogeneous sphere of tightly coupled processing elements. The functional and, in particular, non-functional properties of these computing devices have an effect all the way bottom-up throughout the system software to the point of the application software. Engineering as well as re-engineering of software for such hardware is anything but easy, despite the numerous experiences that can be learned from parallel systems development of the past decades.
The talk considers embedded systems, on the one hand, from the perspective of a special-purpose parallel system and, on the other hand, by taking the position of an operating-system engineer. General opportunities, problems, and challenges by the use of multi-core technology in that domain will be marked out. Difficulties in adopting legacy software are addressed, as well as the degree of transparency that can be expected, for example, from an operating system in order to aid this process. General focus is on embedded systems in the field of control systems, rather than consumer electronics, that have to operate under (soft, firm, hard) real-time constraints.
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Bio
Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat, Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil.
Dr. Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat studied computer science at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, where he also received his Ph.D. and venia legendi. After spending about ten years as a research associate and director of the system software department at the German National Research Center of Computer Science (GMD), Research Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Technique (FIRST), Berlin, he became a full professor for computer science with the main focus on computer networks, distributed systems, and operating systems at the Universities of Potsdam (1995-1997), Magdeburg (1997-2002), and Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU, since 2002), Germany.
As to academic self-administration, he acted as officially appointed expert for the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) and has been member (2004-2010) of the Senate Panel and Grants Committee on Research Training Groups of the German Research Foundation (DFG). He is elected member of the DFG Review Board on subject area 409-03 (Operating, Communication and Information Systems) and serves in the DAAD Selection Committee FIT (ICSI and NII). In addition, he is active on the steering committee and deputy spokesman of the Embedded Systems Initiative (ESI) of FAU.
In respect of selected individual research activities, he participates in the DFG Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio 89 (Invasive Computing) as principal investigator of the Invasive Run-Time Support System (iRTSS), is member of the DFG Research Training Group 1773 “Heterogeneous Image Systems”, therein responsible for resource-aware multi-processing (RAMP), and he is principal investigator in and deputy spokesman of the DFG Research Unit 1508 “Dynamic Adaptable Applications for Bats Tracking by Embedded Communication Systems”. His main research interests are in the domain of real-time embedded distributed/parallel operating systems. Selected memberships in professional associations include ACM, EuroSys, GI/ITG, IEEE, and USENIX.
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Present holder of the Professorship of Computer Science 4 (Distributed Systems and Operating System) at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg –
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