rick@cs.arizona.edu (Rick Schlichting) (02/05/91)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. ------------------- 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