Speaker

Shareef Ahmed

Abstract

Many real-time cyber-physical systems (CPSs) must satisfy timing constraints to ensure safe operation. Thus, these CPSs should be tested for temporal correctness before their real-world deployment. Additionally, these CPSs must operate within strict size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) constraints. To satisfy these SWaP-C requirements, the test for timing correctness should be “exact,” meaning that no system that meets timing constraints should fail the test. Unfortunately, deriving an exact test for emerging real-time CPSs is challenging due to the complexity of artificial-intelligence-enabled workloads and highly parallel hardware platforms. In this talk, I will show how exact tests can be devised for systems with or without dataflow dependencies under common real-time scheduling policies. I will also discuss how to exactly (or ‘almost’ exactly) account for delays due to accessing mutually exclusive shared resources by resolving mysteries around optimal locking protocols. Finally, I will briefly discuss my work on parallelizable tasks that require co-scheduling of threads.

Bio

Shareef Ahmed is a final year PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, advised by Prof. James H. Anderson. His research interests include real-time cyber-physical systems, autonomous systems, parallel and distributed systems, and theoretical computer science. His current research focuses on scheduling and synchronization algorithms for emerging real-time CPSs. His work has been published in top real-time systems conferences, including RTSS, RTAS, and ECRTS. Two of his papers have received outstanding paper awards, and one has received a best paper award. He has been named a CPS Rising Star in 2024.