11th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS)

Per Håkan Sundell

Department of Computing Science, Chalmers University of Technology
SE -412 96 Göteborg, Sweden
e-mail: phs@cs.chalmers.se

Travel report

The main purpose of my trip to York in England, June 9th to June 11th 1999, was to visit the 11th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems. I have never been to an international scientific conference in real-time systems before, and as this conference is one of the leading in the field, I chosed to visit it this year. The trip was also combined with a visit to the RTOS software vendor company Northern Real-Time Group (NRTG).

The quality of the papers were very good, and also the presentations had a very high quality. Since my research area is mainly about wait-free and lock-free techniques and their applicability in automotive systems, there weren't any paper that directly addressed me. The paper that got closest to my area was Shadowing-based Crash Recovery Schemes for Real-Time Database Systems (LihChyun Shu, Huey-Min Sun, Tei-Wei Kuo) that used some kind of a wait-free transaction technique. The very nice invited talk about "Automotive Electronics" held by Hermann Kopetz, also addressed the need for high-performing synchronization methods in distributed systems.

The organization at the conference center was although not that high standard, I was actually very surprised and disappointed at some of the strange arrangements. The actual conference hall was far too small and narrow as I experienced it. It was very hard to see anything but the backs of the other listeners, so you could not follow the slides, only just listen to the speaker and look at the paper. It got even stranger when we very supposed to eat lunch and other meals standing up without any table, so you had to behave like an animal. Even the dinner at the reception was arranged without tables at first until we complained.

The visit to NRTG was done together with some people from the WARPing project and also some WCET analysts from Uppsala. We had a meeting with Ken Tindell and was allowed to get a copy of their old version of their RTOS called TPK. Not quite a real success as we really wanted to get their new SSX5 version, but at least it is a good starter.

Submitted: Mon Aug 16 13:03 1999
By: Per Håkan Sundell
At: Department of Computing Science, Chalmers University of Technology