Page type: project

HORUS DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT;HORUS DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT; Kenneth Birman (ken@cs.cornell.edu); Robbert van Renesse (rvr@cs.cornell.edu);Cornell's;Horus effort has developed a programming environment for reliable;distributed computing. During the last year, Horus was used to demonstrate;groupware and fault-tolerance over high performance networks, and was found;to offer higher performance than other similar systems. Novel features of;Horus are its flexible software architecture, in which applications;pay only for features that they use, and support for virtually synchronous;process groups, a technology that we developed in our prior work on the; Isis;Toolkit, which has become a significant commercial success. Horus also offers;a fault-tolerant; security;and privacy technology, which we view as an important;research advance.;During 1995, we will be extending Horus to provide extremely low latency,;high performance;real-time capabilities. Our approach combines elements of;a communication technology called;Active Messages;with a multi-media playback;system called;Continuous Media. By the end of the year, we expect to;demonstrate high speed interactive applications with remote multimedia;servers, such as might be used in remote telemedicine applications or video;on demand systems. All of this will retain the existing fault-tolerance and;security options of Horus, and its virtual synchrony programming model.;Prior work on; Isis;has created a substantial user base, and we expect;rapid uptake of Horus within this community as it matures. Isis users span;a wide range of industries, including telecommunications systems, financial;trading systems, stock market automation, factory-floor process control for;discrete electronic component manufacture, air traffic control, and space-based;communications system management and control. Applications of Isis are being;explored in several branches of the military, as well as the NSA and other;non-military government branches. Among the more visible military efforts is;the Naval Hiper-D project, which is exploring the use of Isis in a new system;that prototypes technologies for future enhancements of the AEGIS battle;radar system. The more demanding applications in this user base would benefit;from access to Horus, and our initial plan is to make it possible to migrate;Isis applications to Horus with few changes, thus benefiting this community;in a direct way. Technology transition has occured through licensing agreements;with Isis Distributed Systems Inc., a subsidiary of Stratus Computers. However,;all of our Cornell work is also available to researchers at no fee, and is;described through detailed publications and programming manuals.;Looking to the future, we hope that a mixture of Isis and Horus technologies;will permit us to develop some of the very demanding applications that will be;seen in next-generation groupware and planning systems. The illustration below;shows such an application: a military mission control and planning system;that integrates data from a variety of space, air and ground resources and;uses this to coordinate actions of various theatre assets. Systems of this;sort will demand the utmost in performance, reliability and security, while;also tolerating failures and rapidly reconfiguring to respond to changing;demands. Success in our project will thus impact a wide range of both civilian;and military technology efforts.;Dept. of Computer Science / Cornell University / ken@cs.cornell.edu;