Tommaso Cucinotta

Associate professor @ Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna

Since middle school, I grew up with programming in Basic and Assembly 6502 on a Commodore 64, and later on with Assembly 68000 on an Amiga 500. I’ve got a Computer Engineering degree from University of Pisa and a PhD from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (SSSA) of Pisa, where I spent more than 20 years at the Real-Time Systems Laboratory (ReTiS) carrying out research on smart-card based authentication and adaptive real-time scheduling strategies in the Linux kernel. In year 2012, I left academia to become a MTS in Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs in Dublin, Ireland, carrying out research in security and real-time performance of cloud-based systems. In July 2014, I became a Software Development Engineer in Amazon DataBase Services, Dublin, Ireland, where I worked on improving the real-time performance and scalability of DynamoDB. Since 2016, I’m back at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna as associate professor, holding courses on Component-Based Software Design, Cloud Computing and Big-Data processing infrastructures. An overview of my research interests, published papers and patents can be found on my home page: http://retis.santannapisa.it/~tommaso/eng/publications.html

Talks

2018	Low-latency and power-efficient audio applications on Linux
45'	Building Linux-based low-latency audio processing software for nowadays multi-core devices can be cumbersome. I’ll present some of our on-going research on the topic at the Real-Time Systems Lab of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, focusing on sound synthesis on Android where power-efficiency is a must. The talk will provide basic background information on how the audio sub-system of Linux works, in terms of interactions between the Linux kernel and the ALSA sound architecture, including how user-space applications normally cope with low-latency requirements, touching briefly on design concepts behind the existence of the JACK low-latency framework. Then, a few concepts will be provided on the peculiarities of the Android audio processing pipeline, crossing the concepts with the due complications arising from the world of mobile and power-efficient devices. Throughout the talk, I’ll touch upon concepts behind our research efforts on the topic, describing how properly designed real-time CPU scheduling strategies can make a difference in what is achievable in this area. Talk page

2018

Low-latency and power-efficient audio applications on Linux

45'

Building Linux-based low-latency audio processing software for nowadays multi-core devices can be cumbersome. I’ll present some of our on-going research on the topic at the Real-Time Systems Lab of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, focusing on sound synthesis on Android where power-efficiency is a must. The talk will provide basic background information on how the audio sub-system of Linux works, in terms of interactions between the Linux kernel and the ALSA sound architecture, including how user-space applications normally cope with low-latency requirements, touching briefly on design concepts behind the existence of the JACK low-latency framework. Then, a few concepts will be provided on the peculiarities of the Android audio processing pipeline, crossing the concepts with the due complications arising from the world of mobile and power-efficient devices. Throughout the talk, I’ll touch upon concepts behind our research efforts on the topic, describing how properly designed real-time CPU scheduling strategies can make a difference in what is achievable in this area.

Talk page