Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna

Pisa, Italy
www.sssup.it

Role

Leading WP3, OS-level techniques, scheduling, energy-aware methods.

Specific skills

The Real-Time Systems Group (RETIS) at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna is one of the world’s leading research teams in the area of embedded real-time systems, time critical scheduling algorithms, and advanced operating systems. The group was established by Giorgio Buttazzo in 1993 and is currently composed of 18 people.

The RETIS group has been involved in many European research projects related to several aspects of real-time systems, including scheduling, operating systems support for embedded systems, development tools for real-time applications, and real-time control software. For example, in the European project OCERA (“Open Components for Embedded Real-time Applications”), the RETIS group contributed to the design of robust kernel mechanisms for resource partitioning and reservation, which have been integrated in real-time Linux. In the European project FIRST (“Flexible Integrated Real-time Systems Technology”), the RETIS group contributed to the development of novel hierarchical scheduling schemes that allow the application to handle computational activities with different criticality in a predictable and analysable fashion. Lastly, in the European project FABRIC (“Federated Applications Based on Real-Time Interacting Components”), led by Philips, the RETIS group investigated a number of adaptive real-time scheduling strategies to improve the quality of service in home entertainment networks.

Giorgio Buttazzo is also responsible for the Adaptive Real-Time activity in the European Network of Excellence ARTIST2, coordinating ten European research groups working in this area. Another relevant activity of the RETIS group is the development and maintenance of SHaRK, a novel real-time kernel for integrating tasks with hard and soft real-time constraints. The kernel has been designed to be modular and provide predictable and efficient support to critical control applications, as well as multimedia systems. SHaRK is currently used in more than 30 institutions all over the world.

Key personnel

PREDATOR-related publications