Fisher-rosemount Systems, Inc

Unisys Corporation

Ronald Hempel

Todd Mitchell Toepke

Alan Roger Dewey

Joseph D Fisher

James R Logerquist

Laura Briggs

Alden Chester Russell, Iii

Stephen Armstrong

A platform-to-platform communication architecture for a process control messaging service in a process control system or other industrial setting allows stationary and portable industrial computing units to communicate with each other, in one-to-one and one-to-many communications, and across networks, including isolated networks inside the process control system or industrial setting and external networks. A requesting industrial computing device platform generates a message for a destination, or responding, industrial computing device in the communication protocol of the destination platform, and wraps the message in a communication protocol of the process control messaging service. The communication architecture decodes the wrapped message into the communication protocol of the destination industrial computing device and forwards the decoded wrapped message to the destination. The communication architecture allows for a variety of communication services, including, but not limited to, instant/real-time peer-to-peer messaging, time synchronization, automatic data transfer with an asset management system, communication with field devices via an asset management system and large data transfers.

Process control communication between a portable field maintenance tool and a process control instrument

Process control communication between a portable field maintenance tool and an asset management system

A method of and apparatus for efficiently scheduling multiple instruction processors. The instruction processors are assigned to one of a plurality of clusters, such that the system ideally contains a plurality of clusters each having a plurality of instruction processors. Each cluster has a separate scheduling queue wherein the tasks for any one cluster have been selected to maximize cache memory hits by affinity scheduling. Instruction processors are scheduled from the scheduling queue associated with its assigned cluster whenever tasks remain within the cluster. Therefore, under normal system loading conditions, true affinity scheduling is accomplished providing maximum execution efficiency. However, whenever an instruction processor requests assignment and the associated cluster scheduling queue is empty, the instruction processor requests assignment of a task from another scheduling queue associated with a different cluster.

Efficient task management in symmetric multi-processor systems

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Inver Grove Heights, MN, United States of America

Ronald Hempel