rick@cs.arizona.edu (Rick Schlichting) (02/05/91)
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Trip Report -- NEC C & C Laboratory (June 6, 1990)
Richard D. Schlichting (rick@cs.arizona.edu)
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
The University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 86721, USA
[This report represents the personal opinion of the author, who was on
sabbatical in Japan from Dec. 1989 through July 1990. The sabbatical
was supported in part by grant INT-8910818 from the NSF U.S.-Japan
Cooperative Science Program.]
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On Wednesday, I visited the NEC C&C Software Research and Development
Group in the Tamachi area of Tokyo. My host was Dr. Toshio Miyachi,
manager of the "Basic Systems" department and a graduate of Tokyo
Institute of Technology. Upon arriving, we went straight to the 14th
floor of the building, where the guest conference rooms were located.
There, Miyachi have us an overview of the structure of the C&C
laboratory and the work going on. There are about 300 total people
in the lab organized into 3 laboratories, a microcomputer group, and
a software planning office. In keeping with NEC's status as the leading
producer of Japanese PCs, much if not all of the work is microcomputer-based.
In the basic software lab, there are about 60-70 researchers, half
with MS degrees and half with some sort of bachelors' degree (some from
2-year schools.) This particular lab sponsors work in three general
areas: basic software for the V and Vr series 32-bit microprocessors,
real-time software technology, and advanced software development
environments. In addition, the lab is the home of the Unix Technology
Center, which acts as a Unix resource for internal NEC purposes, participates
in Unix standardization, etc. Most of the work in distributed and
fault-tolerant computing is rooted in real-time applications, historically
switching applications and more recently space applications (e.g., Japan's
space station effort). However, for the latter, they were lamenting the
fact that (a) the money devoted to Japan's space effort is small and
shrinking, and (b) there is resistence to using 32-bit designs in space
because of increased latch-up problems due to radiation. The fault-tolerance
work is done as part of the real-time RX-UX OS, which is in turn based
on ITRON.
Following these descriptions, we went to the 5th floor, where
the laboratory itself is located. There, we were given a demo of
the Mustard real-time OS for a prototype multiprocessor
based on the V-series chips. The demo was given Shuichi Hiroya, who
heads up a team of ~10 people working on the project. The first part
of the demo involved running an application on the system with a
graphic display illustrating the status of processes as executing, in
the kernel, waiting on a spin-lock to enter the kernel, etc; the
spin-lock facility is an example of one of the things that they
added to Unix in the process of constructing RX-UX. The second part
illustrated that the system could continue executing even though one
of the processors was turned off.
The remainder of the visit consisted of my own research presentation,
and a nice visit with Yasuyo Kokubo, the general manager of the common
software development laboratory.
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Dr. Toshio Miyachi
Engineering Manager, Basic Systems Department
C&C Common Software Laboratory
NEC Corporation
11-5 Shibaura 2-Chome, Minato-ku
Tokyo 108, Japan
Mr. Shuichi Hiroya
Basic Systems Department, C&C Common Software Laboratory
NEC Corporation
11-5 Shibaura 2-Chome, Minato-ku
Tokyo 108, Japan
Mr. Yasuyo Kokubo
General Manager, C&C Common Software Laboratory
NEC Corporation
11-5 Shibaura 2-Chome, Minato-ku
Tokyo 108, Japan