The Boeing Company Project

Client: TBA

Overview

The Tactical Division of the Integrated Defense System (IDS) Component of Boeing based in Huntington Beach, California produces a turn key system that is based on Sun Microsystem's hardware and software. Currently, the baseline platform is the Sparcstation 20 and SunOS Operating System. Tactical is currently in the process of porting this system to the Solaris 2.6 Operating System.

Statement of Work

Analyze, Define, and Implement a prototype interprocess communication infrastructure (IPCI) that will allow multiple processes to communicate with each other. The IPCI will have processes which need to communicate within the same physical computer and also across a local area network (LAN). This IPCI will also need to address performance requirements and quality of service.

Requirements

The IPCI Project will:

• Provide a documented API into the IPCI class libraries or provide a User's Guide to demonstrate the IPCI functionality.
• IPCI will take 80 Megabytes of binary data and pass it to a process running on the local machine.
• IPCI will take 1 Megabyte of binary data and pass it to a process on the LAN
• IPCI will provide a discrete interface for all the following Solaris 2.6 interprocess mechanisms and performance measures will be taken on each mechanim.
• Shared Memory
• Streams
• First-in-first-out Queues

The Challenge

Since this project defines a piece of a larger program, the students will have to decide if the best approach is to provide a C++ class library and an API document, or if a middleware approach like a Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) Object Request Broker (ORB) is appropriate (CORBA is stated as an example and not as any indication of direction). If the middleware approach is taken then the students will implement the middleware and provide a User's Guide.

Constraints

• There will be no more than fifteen nodes on the local area network.
• The language will be C++
• Solaris 2.6 on Sun Workstations