Contact Information Computer Science, UCB 430 University of Colorado Boulder, CO 80309-0430 Email: Gary DOT Nutt AT colorado DOT edu Office: ECOT 820 Phone: 303-492-7581 Fax: 303-492-2844 WWW: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~nutt

Gary Nutt
Professor
Computer Science

RESEARCH

Real-time Scheduling in CPS

In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in Cyber Physical Systems, CPS (e.g., see the HCSS group in the NITRD program). Generally, CPS systems are thought of as single/networked systems that are intended to provide computational support for physical systems. Lee has written a nice summary of design challenges for CPS. I agree that this is an important and emerging research area, and I strongly encourage visionary work on CPS related topics. For example, Wang-ting Lin's Ph.D. dissertation is a significant contribution to technology that supports the kind of scheduling style that will be required for successful scheduling systems (you can get a good idea about his scheduling work from Technical Report No. CU-CS-1053-09).

Selected Recent Publications

• Lin, Wang-ting and Gary Nutt, "Impact of Non-stationary Workload on Resource Reservation Based Slack Reclamation," Department of Computer Science Technical Report No. CU-CS-1053-09, May 2009, University of Colorado.
• Nutt, Gary, Operating Systems for Single-Threaded Computers, open textbook, 2008, 147 pages. Also see the companion web site with supplementary materials
• Lin, Wang-ting and Gary Nutt "Detecting and Preventing DoS Attacks in Slack Scheduling", 28th IEEE RTSS, WIP, December, 2007.
• Nutt, Gary, "Addressing Small Computers in the First OS Course", Journal on Educational Resources in Computing, 6, 2 (June 2006), pp. 1-13.
• Nutt, Gary, "A Note About Scaling Wireless Sensor Networks", University of Colorado Department of Computer Science Technical Report No. CU-CS-1001-05, December, 2005.
• Nutt, Gary, Distributed Virtual Machines: Inside the Rotor CLI, Addison Wesley, 2005, ISBN 0-321-15983-7, 320 pages.
• Steinke, Robert C. and Gary J. Nutt "A Unified Model of Shared Memory Consistency", Journal of the ACM, Vol. 51, No. 5 (September 2004), pp. 800-849.
• Brandt, Scott and Gary J. Nutt, "Flexible Soft Real-Time Processing in Middleware, "Flexible Soft Real-Time Processing in Middleware", Real-Time Systems, Vol. 22, No. 1-2 (January-March 2002), pp. 77-118.

Here is a listing of all publications.

ABOUT TEXTBOOKS

You can comment about either of these books — or other book ideas — at my blog. If you prefer, feel free to drop me an email note at Gary DOT Nutt AT colorado DOT edu to chat about these ideas.

Thanks in advance for your input,
GN

Current (and a Couple of Old) Books

New Books In Progress

Modern textbooks are very expensive — so much so that I find students will sometimes simply forego buying the textbook for a class even though it obviously damages their chances of learning the topic. Instead, these students scour the net for information that might be in a textbook. As we all know, there are no reviewers for the information published on the net, so learning is pretty hit-or-miss.

The open textbook experiment is a radical step toward making textbook level contents be free to students. I am now thinking about two different models for open style textbooks (both using the Creative Commons licenses):

• Attribution, share alike model. This model is inspired by the Linux software model; anyone can read the book, and (as with the Linux kernel) other authors can rewrite or add to the the book in order to make it be better — better explanations, more breadth, more depth, and so on. In this world, (just as in the Linux kernel world) content developers can provide supplementary materials such as examples, explanations, and exercises.
  • Operating Systems for Single-threaded Computers is a prototype of this type of book. There is also an experimental companion web site with prototypical supplemental materials.
  • Operating Systems for Multi-threaded Computers is intended to describe small systems in which the hardware uses interrupts, but does not use the mode bit to place barriers between the independent threads of execution. This is pretty drafty
• Attribution, noncommercial, no derivative work model. In this option, the electronic book is also free to students, but other authors are not allowed to derive work (or sell) the book. This kind of book can be more tightly integrated with elaborations, examples, exercises, lab exercises, short explanations, and other supplementary materials.
  • I am currently preparing an introductory computing book based on this model; the prototype book is an attempt to describe programming independent of any particular programming language (and to some extent, that harmonize with the idea of computational thinking). The book in combination with the supplementary materials constitutes a principles-based introductory programming book — dynamically bound to the programnming language(s) of choice. Watch this site for the prototype.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the ideas and the prototype content.
Thanks!
GN

I ran out of gas. I had a flat tire. I didn't have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn't come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake, a terrible flood, locusts. It wasn't my fault! I swear to God!