research-article

Flexible task graphs: a unified restricted thread programming model for java

Authors:

Jan VitekAuthors Info & Claims

LCTES '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGPLAN-SIGBED conference on Languages, compilers, and tools for embedded systems

Pages 1 - 11

https://doi.org/10.1145/1375657.1375659

Published: 12 June 2008 Publication History

Get Access

Abstract

The disadvantages of unconstrained shared-memory multi-threading in Java, especially with regard to latency and determinism in realtime systems, have given rise to a variety of language extensions that place restrictions on how threads allocate, share, and communicate memory, leading to order-of-magnitude reductions in latency and jitter. However, each model makes different trade-offs with respect to expressiveness, efficiency, enforcement, and latency, and no one model is best for all applications.

In this paper we present Flexible Task Graphs (Flexotasks), a single system that allows different isolation policies and mechanisms to be combined in an orthogonal manner, subsuming four previously proposed models as well as making it possible to use new combinations best suited to the needs of particular applications. We evaluate our implementation on top of the IBM Web-Sphere Real Time Java virtual machine using both a microbenchmark and a 30 KLOC avionics collision detector. We show that Flexotasks are capable of executing periodic threads at 10 KHz with a standard deviation of 1.2μs and that it achieves significantly better performance than RTSJ's scoped memory constructs while remaining impervious to interference from global garbage collection.

References

[1]

AICAS. The Jamaica virtual machine, www.aicas.com.

Google Scholar

[2]

Austin Armbuster, Jason Baker, Antonio Cunei, David Holmes, Chapman Flack, Filip Pizlo, Edward Pla, Marek Prochazka, and Jan Vitek. A Real-time Java virtual machine with applications in avionics. ACM Transactions in Embedded Computing Systems (TECS), 7(1):1--49, 2007.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[3]

Joshua Auerbach, David F. Bacon, Bob Blainey, Perry Cheng, Michael Dawson, Mike Fulton, David Grove, Darren Hart, and Mark Stoodley. Design and implementation of a comprehensive real-time Java virtual machine. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM & IEEE international conference on Embedded software (EMSOFT), pages 249--258, 2007.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[4]

Joshua Auerbach, David F. Bacon, Florian Bömers, and Perry Cheng. Real-time music synthesis in Java using the Metronome garbage collector. In Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark, August 2007.

Google Scholar

[5]

Joshua S. Auerbach, David F. Bacon, Daniel T. Iercan, Christoph M. Kirsch, V. T. Rajan, Harald Roeck, and Rainer Trummer. Java takes flight: time-portable real-time programming with exotasks. In ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES'07), pages 51--62, San Diego, CA, 2007.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[6]

David F. Bacon, Perry Cheng, and V. T. Rajan. A real-time garbage collecor with low overhead and consistent utilization. In Conference Record of the Thirtieth Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, New Orleans, LA, January 2003.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[7]

David F. Bacon and Peter F. Sweeney. Fast static analysis of C virtual function calls. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications, volume 31, pages 324--341, October 1996.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[8]

BEA. Weblogic real time. www.bea.com, 2006.

Google Scholar

[9]

William S. Beebee, Jr. and Martin Rinard. An implementation of scoped memory for Real-Time Java. In Embedded Software Implementation Tools for Fully Programmable Application Specific Systems (EMSOFT), pages 289--305, 2001.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[10]

Edward G. Benowitz and Albert F. Niessner. Experiences in adopting real-time java for flight-like software. In Proceedings of the International workshop on Java technologies for real-time and embedded systems (JTRES), pages 490--496, 2003.

Google Scholar

[11]

Edward G. Benowitz and Albert F. Niessner. A patterns catalog for RTSJ software designs. In Workshop on Java Technologies for Real-Time and Embedded Systems (JTRES), OTM Workshops, pages 497--507, 2003.

Google Scholar

[12]

Greg Bollella, Tim Canham, Vanessa Carson, Virgil Champlin, Daniel Dvorak, Brian Giovannoni, Mark Indictor, Kenny Meyer, Alex Murray, and Kirk Reinholtz. Programming with non-heap memory in the real-time specification for Java. In Companion of the 18th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, pages 361--369, 2003.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[13]

Greg Bollella, Bertrand Delsart, Romain Guider, Christophe Lizzi, and Frederic Parain. Mackinac: Making hotspot real-time. In Proceedings of the Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Object-Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing (ISORC'05), pages 45--54, 2005.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[14]

Greg Bollella, James Gosling, Benjamin Brosgol, Peter Dibble, Steve Furr, and Mark Turnbull. The Real-Time Specification for Java. Addison-Wesley, June 2000.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[15]

Angelo Corsaro and Ron K. Cytron. Efficient memory reference checks for real-time Java. In Proceedings of Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES'03), 2003.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[16]

Mike Fulton and Mark Stoodley. Compilation techniques for real-time Java programs. In Proc. International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, 2007.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[17]

Sven Gestegard Robertz, Roger Henriksson, Klas Nilsson, Anders Blomdell, and Ivan Tarasov. Using real-time Java for industrial robot control. In Proceedings of the 5th international workshop on Java technologies for real-time and embedded systems (JTRES), pages 104--110, 2007.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[18]

Roger Henriksson. Scheduling Garbage Collection in Embedded Systems. PhD thesis, Lund University, July 1998.

Google Scholar

[19]

IBM. DDG1000 Next Generation Navy Destroyers, www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/21033.wss, 2007.

Google Scholar

[20]

IBM Corporation. IBM Expedited Real Time Task Graphs. www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xrtgs, 2007.

Google Scholar

[21]

Nicolas Juillerat, Stefan Müller Arisona, and Simon Schubiger-Banz. Real-time, low latency audio processing in Java. In Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark, August 2007.

Google Scholar

[22]

E.A. Lee. Overview of the Ptolemy project. Technical Report UCB/ERL M03/25, EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley, 2003.

Google Scholar

[23]

Ingo Molnar and Thomas Gleixner. The RT-PREEMPT patch set for Linux.

Google Scholar

[24]

Albert F. Niessner and Edward G. Benowitz. Rtsj memory areas and their affects on the performance of a flight-like attitude control system. In Proceedings of the International workshop on Java technologies for real-time and embedded systems (JTRES), pages 508--519, 2003.

Google Scholar

[25]

Krzysztof Palacz and Jan Vitek. Java subtype tests in real-time. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP), pages 378--404, Darmstadt, Germany, July 2003.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[26]

Filip Pizlo, Jason Fox, David Holmes, and Jan Vitek. Real-time Java scoped memory: design patterns and semantics. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Object-oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing (ISORC), Vienna, Austria, May 2004.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[27]

Filip Pizlo and Jan Vitek. An empirical evalutation of memory management alternatives for Real-time Java. In Proceedings of the 27th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS), December 2006.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[28]

Purdue University. The Ovm virtual machine, www.ovmj.org.

Google Scholar

[29]

Fridtjof Siebert. The impact of realtime garbage collection on realtime Java programming. In Seventh IEEE International Symposium on Object-Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing (ISORC'04), pages 33--40, 2004.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[30]

Simulink. www.mathworks.com/products/simulink. 2007.

Google Scholar

[31]

Daniel Spoonhower, Joshua Auerbach, David F. Bacon, Perry Cheng, and David Grove. Eventrons: a safe programming construct for high-frequency hard real-time applications. In ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming language design and implementation (PLDI), pages 283--294, 2006.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[32]

Jesper H. Spring, Jean Privat, Rachid Guerraoui, and Jan Vitek. StreamFlex: High-throughput stream programming in Java. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA), October 2007.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[33]

Jesper Honig Spring, Filip Pizlo, Rachid Guerraoui, and Jan Vitek. Reflexes: Abstractions for highly responsive systems. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE), 2007.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[34]

William Thies, Michal Karczmarek, and Saman Amarasinghe. Streamit: A language for streaming applications. In International Conference on Compiler Construction (CC'02), April 2002.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[35]

Tian Zhao, James Noble, and Jan Vitek. Scoped types for real-time Java. In Proceedings of the 25th IEEE International Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS), Lisbon, Portugal, December 2004.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Franco JClebsch SDrossopoulou SVitek JWrigstad T(2018)Correctness of a Concurrent Object Collector for Actor LanguagesProgramming Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-319-89884-1_31(885-911)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89884-1_31
Murphy JShivkumar BPritchard AIraci GKumar DKim SZiarek L(2018)A survey of real‐time capabilities in functional languages and compilersConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience10.1002/cpe.490231:4Online publication date: 23-Oct-2018
https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.4902
Clebsch SFranco JDrossopoulou SYang AWrigstad TVitek J(2017)Orca: GC and type system co-design for actor languagesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/31338961:OOPSLA(1-28)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3133896
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Flexible task graphs: a unified restricted thread programming model for java
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Embedded and cyber-physical systems
    1. Embedded systems
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Interpreters
      2. Runtime environments
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Classes and objects
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Software system structures
      1. Embedded software
      2. Real-time systems software

Recommendations

Streamflex: high-throughput stream programming in java
OOPSLA '07: Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications

The stream programming paradigm aims to expose coarse-grained parallelism inapplications that must process continuous sequences of events. The appeal ofstream programming comes from its conceptual simplicity. A program is acollection of independent ...
Flexible task graphs: a unified restricted thread programming model for java
LCTES '08

The disadvantages of unconstrained shared-memory multi-threading in Java, especially with regard to latency and determinism in realtime systems, have given rise to a variety of language extensions that place restrictions on how threads allocate, share, ...
Safe open-nested transactions through ownership
PPoPP '09

Researchers in transactional memory (TM) have proposed open nesting as a methodology for increasing the concurrency of transactional programs. The idea is to ignore ``low-level'' memory operations of an open-nested transaction when detecting conflicts ...

Reviews

Reviewer: R. Clayton

The real-time specification for Java (RTSJ) established real-time extensions for the Java system. From RTSJ, a hundred flowers have bloomed, each designed to orient RTSJ to a particular niche in the real-time ecosystem. Enough time has passed to see patterns developing, leading to efforts to group related patterns into a framework providing consistent and convenient access to common properties. Flexotask, the flexible task graphs model described in this paper, is one such framework. Flexotask unifies four models into a restricted thread programming model for programs with real-time constraints tighter than those possible with real-time garbage collection. Flexotask tools ensure memory operation safety guarantees by verifying bytecode against type constraints, eliminating the runtime memory checks required by RTSJ scoped memory. Atomic methods or immutable objects allow nonblocking communication between time-constrained tasks and time-oblivious code; bytecode rewriting provides atomicity without programmer effort. Flexotask also supports roll-forward transaction logs for multiprocessors. A 10-kilohertz (kHz) reading benchmark shows Flexotask to be predictable with a few microsecond (?s) jitter and all tasks scheduled within 40 ?s of the period. A collision detection benchmark shows Flexotask to be fast, relative to RTSJ, and imperturbable, relative to Java with or without special garbage collectors. The paper is well written, with enough background for those who are familiar, but not current, with Java real-time systems. Online Computing Reviews Service

Access critical reviews of Computing literature here

Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

LCTES '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGPLAN-SIGBED conference on Languages, compilers, and tools for embedded systems

June 2008

180 pages

ISBN:9781605581040

DOI:10.1145/1375657

General Chair:
Krisztián Flautner
ARM Limited, UK
,
Program Chair:
John Regehr
University of Utah, USA

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 43, Issue 7
LCTES '08
July 2008
167 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1379023
Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 June 2008

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

LCTES08

Sponsor:

LCTES08: ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED 2008 Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems

June 12 - 13, 2008

AZ, Tucson, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 116 of 438 submissions, 26%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

20
Total Citations
View Citations
414
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)4
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 02 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Franco JClebsch SDrossopoulou SVitek JWrigstad T(2018)Correctness of a Concurrent Object Collector for Actor LanguagesProgramming Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-319-89884-1_31(885-911)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89884-1_31
Murphy JShivkumar BPritchard AIraci GKumar DKim SZiarek L(2018)A survey of real‐time capabilities in functional languages and compilersConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience10.1002/cpe.490231:4Online publication date: 23-Oct-2018
https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.4902
Clebsch SFranco JDrossopoulou SYang AWrigstad TVitek J(2017)Orca: GC and type system co-design for actor languagesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/31338961:OOPSLA(1-28)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3133896
Haller PLoiko A(2016)LaCasa: lightweight affinity and object capabilities in ScalaACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3022671.298404251:10(272-291)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3022671.2984042
Haller PLoiko AVisser ESmaragdakis Y(2016)LaCasa: lightweight affinity and object capabilities in ScalaProceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications10.1145/2983990.2984042(272-291)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2983990.2984042
Murphy JShivkumar BZiarek L(2016)Real-time capabilities in functional languages2016 1st CPSWeek Workshop on Declarative Cyber-Physical Systems (DCPS)10.1109/DCPS.2016.7588296(1-10)Online publication date: 12-Apr-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/DCPS.2016.7588296
Bouakaz ATalpin JVitek J(2012)Affine Data-Flow Graphs for the Synthesis of Hard Real-Time ApplicationsProceedings of the 2012 12th International Conference on Application of Concurrency to System Design10.1109/ACSD.2012.16(183-192)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ACSD.2012.16
Stilkerich MThomm IWawersich CSchröder-Preikschat W(2012)Tailor-made JVMs for statically configured embedded systemsConcurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience10.1002/cpe.175524:8(789-812)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/cpe.1755
Haller POdersky M(2010)Capabilities for uniqueness and borrowingProceedings of the 24th European conference on Object-oriented programming10.5555/1883978.1884002(354-378)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1883978.1884002
Ziarek LKalibera TVitek J(2010)PRP: priority rollback protocol -- a PIP extension for mixed criticality systemsProceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Java Technologies for Real-Time and Embedded Systems10.1145/1850771.1850784(82-84)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1850771.1850784
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Abstract

References

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Streamflex: high-throughput stream programming in java