Maritime Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) and Space Exploitation

Not Available Complex distributed systems are difficult to develop, validate and maintain. Instead of exhibiting graceful degradation under stress these types of systems tend to collapse, degrading far out of proportion to the increase in demand or loss in hardware performance causing the stress. The solution is to develop a new composable software architecture and agile run-time system which allows systems to dynamically reconfigure to balance loads and mitigate hardware failures. The proposed fractal architecture will consist of three elements: 1) An interface specification and framework for coding primitive modules using traditional programming languages. 2) A new fractal language for composing primitive modules into components, components into more capable components, and components into programs. 3) A distributed agile run-time system to execute these fractal programs, which is able to migrate tasks between processors to balance system loads and resurrect tasks to recover from hardware failures. The Phase I effort will design these three facets of the architecture as well as develop examples illustrating how the architecture would be used, how the system reacts to stress, and prediction of its run-time scalability and performance. Phase II will focus on implementing a prototype and conducting detailed performance evaluations.