larry@JPL-VLSI.ARPA (06/17/86)
I just returned from the ADA/Space Station Conference in Houston, roughly
four days of four-track half-hour presentations. It was jointly and fairly
smoothly hosted by Johnson Space Center and the University of Houston at
Clear Lake (the township surrounding the two institutions). It also had a
lot of help from the local SIGAda and vendors.
One topic, discussed Tuesday night with a panel containing several of the
CAIS and KIT/KITIA teams and chaired by NASA's Ed Chevers, was the
desirability of putting a CAIS requirement in the contract for the Software
Development Environment for the space station. This will a facility
maintained at JSC which will contain all ground- and space-based SW and linked
to all developers at contractor and other NASA sites. They will, of course,
have to have compatible environments (if not identical ones).
Chevers (and a couple of other NASA people) took the devil's advocate position.
One argument was "We've got to have an operational SDE by mid-87 and the CAIS
won't even be finalized then." Also, "With an Ada compiler on every computer
in the SDE, why do we need a CAIS to port tools to computers from different
vendors?" Not surprisingly, there was a lot of opposition to the rather
tongue-in-cheek NASA position.
In keeping with a low-risk/high-gain approach, my suggestion is to include in
the SDE Request for Purchase (due around the end of this year) a requirement
for the ability to easily upgrade to the future CAIS. My reasoning is that
modern operating systems are highly modular and already contain most
of what any KAPSE needs, so could (probably SHOULD) be periodically upgraded
to a new user or development environment. This would exclude archaic OSs like
IBM's MVS and Sperry-Univac's Exec8, and include IBM's VM, DEC's VMS, etc.
Before I make a formal proposal to the Space Station SW Working Group, I'd like
to ask this distribution list: am I right? If not, how am I wrong?
Larry @ jpl-vlsi.arpaalden%jade@spp1.UUCP (06/20/86)
Larry, You have some good points. I think that it is important for the CAIS or someting like it to be used by NASA. I think that it should be an Ada interface and support development of tools written in Ada. I am worried about RFP's that have requirements that say things like "should be compatible or upgradable" with future and undefined entities. I think that the contractor has an easy out if the thing isn't compatible. ...Tony Alden