🚀 go-pugleaf

Date: Friday November 13, 1992
Time: 12:30-2:00 PM
Place: 3440 Boelter Hall - The Archives

META: A TOOLKIT FOR BUILDING DISTRIBUTED REACTIVE SYSTEMS
Keith Marzullo
Cornell University
University of California, San Diego
Department of Computer Science

A reactive system consists of an instrumented environment that is 
monitored and controlled by an input-driven control program. Process 
control systems are one kind of a reactive system, in which the 
environment is a physical system and the control program has hard real-
time obligations. Non real-time applications of a reactive architecture 
include system monitoring and debugging, tool control integration, and 
the management of the resources and the execution of computer 
applications.

Over the last four years, we have developed the Meta toolkit for 
building distributed, fault-tolerant (albeit non-real-time) reactive 
systems. Our concentration has been towards the management of 
distributed applications, and so the primitives that Meta supports are 
designed for this problem domain. However, Meta has been used both 
within and outside of Cornell for other problems such as network 
monitoring and control panel testbeds and distributed simulation 
control.

This talk will give a brief overview of the Meta toolkit, using as a 
driving example a simple application in which a network-based server is
converted into a distributed,load-adaptive service. Issues of 
consistency and fault-tolerance will be discussed. The performance of 
the current version will be given and our future plans will be 
presented.