Jim Laurent's Weblog

As someone who used to work at Gould Computer System division (aka Encore Computer), I've always had a soft spot in my heart for real-time computing.  Gould produced proprietary HW platforms and OS used in flight simulation, nuclear power simulation and data telemetry collection.  I remember when we used to brag about 32 microsecond response time to interrupts and 3 MB/s data interfaces.  Unfortunately, general purpose computers put the big RT players (Gould, Harris, Modcomp, Concurrent) out of business.  Initially it was SGI with their big iron and real-time extensions to Irix.  Later with Solaris 8, Sun introduced real-time extensions which could be used on our Sparc as well as AMD based systems.

Solaris 10 today can meet those same stringent 32 microsecond response times in a general purpose OS with high ISV acceptance that is available on Sparc, Intel and AMD (soon PowerPC) platforms. 

One of the key proponents of real-time computing within Sun has recently joined the blogging world.

Please check out "The jel's weblog Musings on realtime" 

In his initial entry he discusses:

• The foundations of Solaris real-time
• Real-time benchmark details
• How good is Solaris real-time? (Short answer: really good with 32 microsecond response time)
  

And I shouldn't forget to mention that our code for real-time extensions is all part of OpenSolaris 

Why should you care?

Real-time computing is NOT just for the lunatic fringe anymore.  It is a key component in any system that requires predictable response times including financial trading systems, military command and control systems and others.  Solaris has a signficant lead on other unix/linux vendors in this area.