Nowadays, event processing is becoming the backbone of many applications. Therefore, it is necessary to provide suitable abstractions to properly modularize the concerns that appear in event-driven applications. We identify four categories of languages that support event-driven programming, and identify their shortcomings in achieving modularity in the implementation of applications. We propose gummy modules and their implementation in the GummyJ language as a solution. Gummy modules have well-defined event-based interfaces, and can have a primitive or a composite structure. Composite gummy modules are means to group a set of correlated event processing concerns and restrict the visibility of events among them. We provide an example usage of gummy modules, and discuss their event processing semantics.

Abstract This paper introduces a new embedded Java multi-core architecture which shows a significantly better performance for a large number of cores than the related projects JopCMP and jamuth IP multi-core. The cores gain fast access to the shared heap by a fullduplex bus with pipelined transactions. Each core is equipped with local on-chip memory for the Java operand stack and the method cache to further reduce the memory bandwidth requirements. As opposed to the related projects, synchronization is supported on a per object-basis instead of a single lock. Load balancing is implemented in Java and requires no additional hardware. The multi-port memory manager includes an exact and fully concurrent garbage collector for automatic memory management. The design can be synthesized for a variable number of parallel cores and shows a linear increase in chip-space. Three different benchmarks demonstrate the very good scalability of our architecture. Due to limited chip-space on our evaluation platform, the core count could not be increased further than 8. But, we expect a smooth performance decrease.

Die Modellierung natürlicher Neuronenpopulationen stellt den Versuch dar, komplizierte Wechselwirkungen und Ereignisabhängigkeiten in biologischen Systemen quantitativ erfassen zu wollen. Widersprüchlich erscheint dabei die Tatsache, daß ein einzelnes Neuron in einer Population ohne Signifikanz ist, daß sich die gesamte Population aber aus einer Vielzahl derartiger Neuronen zusammensetzt und eine, technischen Systemen überlegene funktionelle Vielfalt besitzt /ZUR 92/, /HOL 93/. Ergo setzt sich die Gesamtleistung eines Systems nicht aus der Summe der Leistungen seiner Komponenten "summarisch" zusammen, sondern resultiert vielmehr aus deren Wechselwirkungen. Technisch interessant erscheinen an dieser Stelle mindestens zwei Fragen: * Welcher Mechanismus begründet den genannten Widerspruch in Neuronenpopulationen? * Welche technische Anleihe bietet dieser Mechanismus? Die Modellierung einer Neuronenpopulation kann auf zweierlei Art und Weise erfolgen. Entweder durch die Aufklärung der Neuronenpopulation "von innen heraus", d.h. durch Beobachtung und mathematische Formulierung physiologischer Abläufe oder durch vergleichende Betrachtungen mit "konvergenten" Modellen, d.h. durch die Schaffung von Modellen mit vergleichbaren Phänomenen. Die nachfolgenden Ausführungen favorisieren die letztgenannte Vorgehensweise. Phänomene sind die ereignisabhängigen Schwellwertentwicklungen der Neuronen in Wechselwirkung mit den umgebenden Neuronen sowie die ereignisabhängigen Entwicklungen der synaptischen Verbindungsstärken zwischen den Neuronen, bezeichnet als "Leitwertentwicklung". Technische Anwendungen dieser Simulationsergebnisse werden erörtert, zum Beispiel die Nachbildung der Durchdringung diffusionsfähiger Medien mit Schadstoffen und die Objektvereinzelung.

The problem of generating a surface triangulation from a set of points with normal information arises in several mesh processing tasks like surface reconstruction or surface resampling. In this paper we present a surface triangulation approach which is based on local 2d delaunay triangulations in tangent space. Our contribution is the extension of this method to surfaces with sharp corners and creases. We demonstrate the robustness of the method on difficult meshing problems that include nearby sheets, self intersecting non manifold surfaces and noisy point samples.

Die Erregungsausbreitung in neuronalen Systemen beruht auf materieller Grundlage, Transmittermoleküle werden präsynaptisch emittiert und postsynaptisch absorbiert. Emission und Absorption sind einander sich selbst verursachende Prozesse, sie sind voneinander ereignisabhängig und damit nur schwer zu unterscheiden. Diese Schwierigkeit wird prekär, wenn es darum geht, den Prozeß der Erregungsausbreitung technisch modellieren und simulieren zu wollen. Im Verlaufe der Simulation bilden sich Abhängigkeiten heraus, deren Ursachen nicht mehr vereinzelt werden können. Demzufolge ist es schwierig, das Verhalten des Simulationsmodells zu prognostizieren. Gleichermaßen schwierig ist es aber auch, das gezeigte Verhalten zweifelsfrei interpretieren zu wollen. Aus diesem Grunde macht es sich erforderlich, das Verhalten eines neuronalen Netzes auf analytischem Wege zu beschreiben. Erschwerend wirkt hierbei der Umstand, daß es innerhalb des Netzes voneinander ereignisabhängige Prozesse gibt, die sich selbst verursachen. Zur Beschreibung dessen gibt es zwei in Raum und Zeit variable Parameter: erstens die Vorzugsorientierung bei der Erregungsausbreitung, bezeichnet als "Beweglichkeit", und zweitens die Durchlässigkeit des Netzes für den Erregungstransport, bezeichnet als "Diffusionskoeffizient". Diese beiden Parameter werden hergenommen, um eine vektoranalytische Beschreibungsgleichung abzuleiten, Unterschiede zu "klassischen" neuronalen Netzen werden herausgestellt.

The problem of generating a surface triangulation from a set of points with normal information arises in several mesh processing tasks like surface reconstruction or surface resampling. In this paper we present a surface triangulation approach which is based on local 2d delaunay triangulations in tangent space. Our contribution is the extension of this method to surfaces with sharp corners and creases. We demonstrate the robustness of the method on difficult meshing problems that include nearby sheets, self intersecting non manifold surfaces and noisy point samples.

This report introduces XASM, a generic and retargetable assembler that can be used as a stand-alone tool, as well as a Java library or framework providing assembler-related Java classes for application programs. It is not necessary to modify or recompile the assembler in order to adapt it to new target architectures. Retargetability is achieved by Opcode Maps, a textual description of the instruction mnemonics and encodings of the target architecture, for which to generate machine code. Opcode maps feature an inheritance model, which makes them clearer and also means less effort in describing an instruction set because only the extensions compared to its binary compatible parent instruction set(s) need to be specified.

The mixed-criticality toolbox promises system architects a powerful framework for consolidating real-time tasks with different safety properties on a single computing platform. Thanks to the research efforts in the mixed-criticality field, guarantees provided to the highest criticality level are well understood. However, lower-criticality job execution depends on the condition that all high-criticality jobs complete within their more optimistic low-criticality execution time bounds. Otherwise, no guarantees are made. In this paper, we add to the mixed-criticality toolbox by providing a probabilistic analysis method for low-criticality tasks. While deterministic models reduce task behavior to constant numbers, probabilistic analysis captures varying runtime behavior. We introduce a novel algorithmic approach for probabilistic timing analysis, which we call symbolic scheduling. For restricted task sets, we also present an analytical solution. We use this method to calculate per-job success probabilities for low-criticality tasks, in order to quantify, how low-criticality tasks behave in case of high-criticality jobs overrunning their optimistic low-criticality reservation.

Network coding is a promising approach for increasing performance of multicast data transmission and reducing energy costs. Of course, it is essential to consider security aspects to ensure a reliable data transmission. Particularly, pollution attacks may have serious impacts in network coding since a single attacker can jam large parts of the network. Therefore, various approaches have been introduced to secure network coding against this type of attack. However, introducing security increases costs. Even though there are some performance analysis of secure schemes, to our knowledge there are no details whether these schemes are worthwhile to replace routing under the facet of efficiency. Thus, we discuss in this report parameters to assess the efficiency of secure network coding schemes. Using three network graphs, we evaluate parameters focusing on communication overhead for selected schemes. Our results show that there are still benefits in comparison to routing depending on the network topology.

This report details the design of a garbage collection (GC) module, which introduces modern GC features to the domain of embedded implementations. The described design supports weak references and feeds reference queues. Its architecture allows multiple concurrent application cores operating as mutators on the shared memory managed by the GC module. The garbage collection is exact and fully concurrent so as to enable the uninterrupted computational progress of the mutators. It combines a distributed root marking with a centralized heap scan of the managed memory. It features a novel mark-and-copy GC strategy on a segmented memory, which thereby overcomes both the tremendous space overhead of two-space copying and the compaction race of mark-and-compact approaches. The proposed GC architecture has been practically implemented and proven using the embedded bytecode processor SHAP as a sample testbed. The synthesis results for settings up to three SHAP mutator cores are given and online functional measurements are presented. Basic performance dependencies on the system configuration are evaluated.