budden@nosc.NOSC.MIL (Rex A. Buddenberg) (01/19/90)
A few days ago, I tried to reply to a posting on this question, but
mail to UK doesn't swim well. On the other hand, probably general purpose
topic anyway, so when the last meeting's minutes came today...:
The US Navy's Next Generation Computer Resources program has
several projects in some stage of progress. SAFENET is the first (and most
familiar to me) to generate a standard for LANs suitable for operational
use in tactical deistributed systems on ships. We've specifying it in
our next generation of cutters to hold up the integrated nav system.
The second group is the Standard Backplane working group with was
instrumental in getting the Ruggedbus and Superbus folks together under
Superbus+. Since VITA has announced a bridge architecture so you can
have VME today, and Superbus+ in a couple years along with a way to
get from here to there, this group has settled down to pretty mechanical
things.
The third group is the Operating Systems Standards Working Group
which is occupied with network operating systems that encompass multiple
processes on multiple machines over a network. Since the contextual
environment is the combat system on a warship, a lot of notions of 'real time'
are accounted for in the work.
OSSWG has generated a requirements document and an objective report card.
Current events will be to bang several candidates against the standards
(which may generate some consolidations). The evaluation criteria include
file interface, generalized I/O interface, network & communication,
reliability, adaptability, maintainability, resource management
interface, project support environment interaction, synch/scheduling
interface, time services interface, Ada language support interface.
Also capability and security service class criteria. (Most of this is
a rote copy so don't ask me to explain it intelligently).
The candidates being considered:
Alpha - Dr Doug Jensen, Concurrent Computer Corp
ARTX - Dr Dado Vrsalovic, Ready Systems Corp
CHRONUS - Ken Schroder, BBN
iRMX - Van Kane, Intel
Mach - Rod Johnson, Open Software Foundation
ORKID - Dick Vanderlin, Motorola
POSIX - Dr Doug Locke, IBM
MTOS - Carol Sigda, Industrial Programming Inc
SDOS - Ken Schroder, BBN
The working groups are all designed to have a lot of industry participation
(Navy is earnestly trying to shed the NIH syndrome here), and there are
a few freelance consultants who participate.
I'm not capable of supporting a technical discussion of distributed OSs
and I'm not familiar with any of these in any detail, but...there is
real work going on, and it is quite likely to be something of an industry
driver. (SAFENET and Backplane have both proven to be.)
OSSWG is fairly open, but pre-registration is required to keep some
control. If there is interest in this newsgroup, I'll try to connect
left and right hands.
Rex Buddenberg
(the USCG spy)