andersoj.org oddments

William Wulf of the National Academy of Engineering gave testimony last month to the US House Science Committee on the topic of The State of Computer Science Research in the U.S. and the Evolution of Federal Support for It. This testimony is directly in support of the types of grants funding Viriginia Tech’s real-time computing work, and the types of grants we seek from DARPA, NSF, and the rest. –JA

On a personal note, I passed my Qualifying Exam for the Direct Ph.D. program at Virginia Tech, and am now a candidate for a degree in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

I was asked to provide a written submission and an oral presentation on the following technical papers and their research context:

• Andy Wellings, Ray Clark, Doug Jensen, Doug Wells: A Framework for Integrating the Real-Time Specification for Java and Java’s Remote Method Invocation [citeseer]
• P. Li and B. Ravindran: Fast, Best-Effort Real-Time Scheduling Algorithms [PDF]
• Marcos K. Aguilera, Gérard Le Lann, Sam Toueg: On the Impact of Fast Failure Detectors on Real-Time Fault-Tolerant Systems [SpringerLink]

The foils from my presentation are available in PDF for those who are interested.

[UPDATE] The Le Lann paper presents new algorithms to solve the Consensus Problem and some related problems in distributed systems. The MIT Open CourseWare program has a course in distributed algorithms which has a number of relevant papers and presentations.

JA