Middleware for Resource-Aware Deployment and Configuration of Fault-Tolerant Real-time Systems

Developing large-scale distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems is hard in part due to complex deployment and configuration issues involved in satisfying multiple quality for service (QoS) properties, such as real-timeliness and fault tolerance. This paper makes three contributions to the study of deployment and configuration middleware for DRE systems that satisfy multiple QoS properties. First, it describes a novel task allocation algorithm for passively replicated DRE systems to meet their real-time and fault-tolerance QoS properties while consuming significantly less resources. Second, it presents the design of a strategizable allocation engine that enables application developers to evaluate different allocation algorithms. Third, it presents the design of a middleware agnostic configuration framework that uses allocation decisions to deploy application components/replicas and configure the underlying middleware automatically on the chosen nodes. These contributions are realized in the DeCoRAM (Deployment and Configuration Reasoning and Analysis via Modeling) middleware. Empirical results on a distributed testbed demonstrate DeCoRAM’s ability to handle multiple failures and provide efficient and predictable real-time performance.