RE: Ada a Real-Time Lang.?

RE: Ada a Real-Time Lang.?

[larry]

--
Let me issue a challenge here.  Can anyone tell me of a hard real-time
system which is operational now that was written in Ada?  Or even a beta
version that is scheduled for delivery and operation before the year is
out?  I'll bet no one can.

And I hope I lose that bet.  I'd dearly love to bring the program manager
and lead engineers here to Jet Propulsion Lab, and the vendors of the
compiler and other tools they used, for a half-day or full-day symposium on
Ada and Real-Time. 
                                      Larry @ VLSI.JPL.NASA.GOV

Re: Ada a Real-Time Lang.?

[Mark Broadbent]

In article <890421184316.1e25@VLSI.JPL.NASA.GOV>, larry@VLSI.JPL.NASA.GOV writes:
> Let me issue a challenge here.  Can anyone tell me of a hard real-time
> system which is operational now that was written in Ada?  ...

The USAF Ada Simulator Validation Program was designed to test the suitability
of Ada for the realtime requirements involved in aircraft simulators.

        BOEING Military Airplane Company, Huntsville Al. redesigned the
existing E-3A AWACS simulator to run under Ada.

        BURTEK Inc, Tulsa, Ok. implemented the C141B flight simulator using
Ada.
        Each project ran to approximately 100,000 lines of code and came in
on time. The USAF evaluation indicated speedup in execution of many sections
of code, as well as excellent subjective reports from the pilots testing
the simulators.

        I take pride in mentioning that both projects were based on Gould
computers. The compiler was the Gould APLEX implementation of the
Telesoft Telegen II compiler.

The following papers may be of some interest:

"The Next Generation of Trainers: Lessons Learned from the Ada Simulator
 Validation Program",
Jerry H. Hendrix,
Boeing Military Airplane Company,
Simulation and Training Systems,
Huntsville, Alabama.

"Requirements Definition for Ada-Based Training Systems",
Mr Mike Caffey and Dr Matt Narotam,
Burtek, Inc.
Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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Re: Ada a Real-Time Lang.?

[Richard S D'Ippolito]

In article <99@gldsyd.OZ> Mark Broadbent writes:

>In article <890421184316.1e25@VLSI.JPL.NASA.GOV>, larry@VLSI.JPL.NASA.GOV writes:

>> Let me issue a challenge here.  Can anyone tell me of a hard real-time
>> system which is operational now that was written in Ada?  ...
>
>The USAF Ada Simulator Validation Program was designed to test the suitability
>of Ada for the realtime requirements involved in aircraft simulators.
>
>        BOEING Military Airplane Company, Huntsville Al. redesigned the
>existing E-3A AWACS simulator to run under Ada.
>
>        BURTEK Inc, Tulsa, Ok. implemented the C141B flight simulator using
>Ada.

Since this appears to be the "atta-boy" season, allow me to mention that the
group here at the SEI consisting of D'Ippolito, Lee, Plinta, Rissman, and
Van Scoy acted as technical consultants to the AF ASVP SPO and to those
contractors, and we were involved with both design teams.  Both of the
systems were redesigns of simulators written in FORTRAN, and not translations.

A report ("An OOD Paradigm for Flight Simulators", CMU/SEI-88-TR-30,
available from DTIC), presents our work on modeling several of the aircraft
systems.  These system models consisted of a set of non-nested, independent
objects updated in a very controlled manner, and were a successful
demonstration of OOD techniques.

Furthermore, the refined model is being successfully applied in other
simulator systems.  We are currently working on models inplemented in Ada in
other real-time domains, such as C3I and embedded systems.


Rich
-- 
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Ideas have consequences.                                    RSD@sei.cmu.edu
Richard Weaver
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