The recent technological advancements and market trends are causing an interesting phenomenon towards the convergence of the high-performance and the embedded computing domains. Critical real-time embedded systems are increasingly concerned with providing higher performance to implement advanced functionalities in a predictable way. OpenMP, the de-facto parallel programming model for shared memory architectures in the high-performance computing domain, is gaining the attention to be used in embedded platforms. The reason is that OpenMP is a mature language that allows to efficiently exploit the huge computational capabilities of parallel embedded architectures. Moreover, OpenMP allows to express parallelism on top of the current technologies used in embedded designs (e.g., C/C++ applications). At a lower level, OpenMP provides a powerful task-centric model that allows to define very sophisticated types of regular and irregular parallelism. While OpenMP provides relevant features for embedded systems, both the programming interface and the execution model are completely agnostic to the timing requirements of real-time systems. This thesis evaluates the use of OpenMP to develop future critical real-time embedded systems. The first contribution analyzes the OpenMP specification from a timing perspective. It proposes new features to be incorporated in the OpenMP standard and a set of guidelines to implement critical real-time systems with OpenMP. The second contribution develops new methods to analyze and predict the timing behavior of parallel applications, so that the notion of parallelism can be safely incorporated into critical real-time systems. Finally, the proposed techniques are evaluated with both synthetic applications and real use cases parallelized with OpenMP. With the above contributions, this thesis pushes the limits of the use of task-based parallel programming models in general, and OpenMP in particular, in critical real-time embedded domains.

Real-time functionality is essential for developing many consumer, industrial, and systems devices. While the C/C++ programming language is most often used in the creation of real-time software, the Java language, with its simple and familiar object-oriented programming model, offers many advantages over current real-time practices. Concurrent and Real-Time Programming in Java covers the motivations for, and semantics of, the extensions and modifications to the Java programming environment that enable the Java platform (Virtual Machine) to meet the requirements and constraints of real-time development. Key aspects of concurrent and real-time programming and how they are implemented in Java are discussed, such as concurrency, memory management, real-time scheduling, and real-time resource sharing.

Aimed at researchers, professors, practitioners, students and other computing professionals, this work looks at: new paradigms for parallel and distributed real-time systems; operating systems and environments; scheduling; and real-time databases.

These proceedings contain the papers presented at the 20th IFAC/IFIP Annual Workshop on Real Time Programming (WRTP '95) held in Florida, USA on 6-10 November 1995. The unifying theme of the Workshop was the problem presented by the designed construction and maintenance of complex computer systems which are important in sectors such as manufacturing, communications, defence, transportation, aerospace, hazardous environments, energy and health care. These systems frequently include distributed, heterogeneous networks and are constrained by requirements on performance, real time behaviour, fault tolerance, security, adaptability, development time and cost, long life concerns and other areas. The papers were grouped under various topics (complex and dependable real time systems, formal methods, languages, tools and environments, systems and software engineering, advanced applications such as imaging, database systems and heterogeneous systems) and reflect the desire to bring together industrial, academic and government experts from various disciplines and to promote long-term research, near-term effective complex systems requirements and promising tools.