Title:

Time as a First-Class Object in Systems

Summary:

Traditionally, timing and functional considerations were regarded as separate domains in the analysis of digital systems.  A flurry of research in the late 1980s revealed that the world wasn't so simple.  The TAU workshop series was motivated by that research.  The same issues that motivated the development of Tau in the analysis of on-chip systems have also come up in the context of networking  and software systems, and have become of particular interest in the era of digital systems.

In this talk, I'll give a high-level overview of the motivation for this, and various attempts to incorporate time into the analysis of digital systems, and some constraints that are inherent in this.

Bio:

Rick McGeer is currently Chief Executive Officer at engageLively and Chief Scientist at US Ignite. Previously, he was a a Principal Investigator at the Communication Design Group of SAP Labs America, Distinguished Technologist in HP Enterprise Systems and HP Laboratories, the co-founder and Chief Scientist of Softface, Inc., the co-founder and Research Scientist at Cadence Berkeley Labs, a Research Scientist at UC-Berkeley and an Assisitant Professor at the University of British Columbia.  He is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Victoria.  He earned his Ph. D. in Computer Science from UC-Berkeley. He is the author of two books and over 120 refereed papers in technical conferences and journals.  He was a co-founder of the PlanetLab consortium and remains a member of the PlanetLab Steering Committee.   He was on the original GENI design team and led the InstaGENI initiative, and currently leads the GENI Experiment Engine (PlanetIgnite) project.  He is the co-editor of The GENI Book, from Springer-Verlag in September 2016. He has been a PI on several DARPA programs, notably the Global Mobile (GloMo) program and the Control Plane Program, where he and Jack Brassil led the CHART team to achieve a mean 40x performance improvement on the TCP/IP protocol under military conditions.  Dr. McGeer's Ph.D. thesis, "On the interaction of functional and timing analysis in logic design" was an early work in the consideration of time as a first-class object in sysem design.  Dr. McGeer founded the TAU workshop series in 1990.