A database management capability for Ada

The data requirements of mission critical defense systems have been increasing dramatically. Command and control, intelligence, logistics, and even weapons systems are being required to integrate, process, and share ever increasing volumes of information. To meet this need, systems are now being specified that incorporate data base management subsystems for handling storage and retrieval of information. It is expected that a large number of the next generation of mission critical systems will contain embedded data base management systems. Since the use of Ada has been mandated for most of these systems, it is important to address the issues of providing data base management capabilities that can be closely coupled with Ada. A comprehensive distributed data base management project has been investigated. The key deliverables of this project are three closely related prototype systems implemented in Ada. These three systems are discussed

Space Generic Open Avionics Architecture (SGOAA) reference model technical guide

This report presents a full description of the Space Generic Open Avionics Architecture (SGOAA). The SGOAA consists of a generic system architecture for the entities in spacecraft avionics, a generic processing architecture, and a six class model of interfaces in a hardware/software system. The purpose of the SGOAA is to provide an umbrella set of requirements for applying the generic architecture interface model to the design of specific avionics hardware/software systems. The SGOAA defines a generic set of system interface points to facilitate identification of critical interfaces and establishes the requirements for applying appropriate low level detailed implementation standards to those interface points. The generic core avionics system and processing architecture models provided herein are robustly tailorable to specific system applications and provide a platform upon which the interface model is to be applied

Ground Systems Development Environment (GSDE) interface requirements analysis

A set of procedural and functional requirements are presented for the interface between software development environments and software integration and test systems used for space station ground systems software. The requirements focus on the need for centralized configuration management of software as it is transitioned from development to formal, target based testing. This concludes the GSDE Interface Requirements study. A summary is presented of findings concerning the interface itself, possible interface and prototyping directions for further study, and results of the investigation of the Cronus distributed applications environment

Next generation software environments : principles, problems, and research directions

The past decade has seen a burgeoning of research and development in software environments. Conferences have been devoted to the topic of practical environments, journal papers produced, and commercial systems sold. Given all the activity, one might expect a great deal of consensus on issues, approaches, and techniques. This is not the case, however. Indeed, the term "environment" is still used in a variety of conflicting ways. Nevertheless substantial progress has been made and we are at least nearing consensus on many critical issues.The purpose of this paper is to characterize environments, describe several important principles that have emerged in the last decade or so, note current open problems, and describe some approaches to these problems, with particular emphasis on the activities of one large-scale research program, the Arcadia project. Consideration is also given to two related topics: empirical evaluation and technology transition. That is, how can environments and their constituents be evaluated, and how can new developments be moved effectively into the production sector

Advanced manned space flight simulation and training: An investigation of simulation host computer system concepts

The findings of a preliminary investigation by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in simulation host computer concepts is presented. It is designed to aid NASA in evaluating simulation technologies for use in spaceflight training. The focus of the investigation is on the next generation of space simulation systems that will be utilized in training personnel for Space Station Freedom operations. SwRI concludes that NASA should pursue a distributed simulation host computer system architecture for the Space Station Training Facility (SSTF) rather than a centralized mainframe based arrangement. A distributed system offers many advantages and is seen by SwRI as the only architecture that will allow NASA to achieve established functional goals and operational objectives over the life of the Space Station Freedom program. Several distributed, parallel computing systems are available today that offer real-time capabilities for time critical, man-in-the-loop simulation. These systems are flexible in terms of connectivity and configurability, and are easily scaled to meet increasing demands for more computing power

Ground Systems Development Environment (GSDE) interface requirements and prototyping plan

This report describes the data collection and requirements analysis effort of the Ground System Development Environment (GSDE) Interface Requirements study. It identifies potential problems in the interfaces among applications and processors in the heterogeneous systems that comprises the GSDE. It describes possible strategies for addressing those problems. It also identifies areas for further research and prototyping to demonstrate the capabilities and feasibility of those strategies and defines a plan for building the necessary software prototypes

An Analysis of Composability and Composition Anomalies

The separation of concerns principle aims at decomposing a given design problem into concerns that are mapped to multiple independent software modules. The application of this principle eases the composition of the concerns and as such supports composability. Unfortunately, a clean separation (and composition of concerns) at the design level does not always imply the composability of the concerns at the implementation level. The composability might be reduced due to limitations of the implementation abstractions and composition mechanisms. The paper introduces the notion of composition anomaly to describe a general set of unexpected composition problems that arise when mapping design concerns to implementation concerns. To distinguish composition anomalies from other composition problems the requirements for composability at the design level is provided. The ideas are illustrated for a distributed newsgroup system

Evaluating the operations capability of Freedom's Data Management System

Three areas of Data Management System (DMS) performance are examined: raw processor speed, the subjective speed of the Lynx OS X-Window system, and the operational capacity of the Runtime Object Database (RODB). It is concluded that the proposed processor will operate at its specified rate of speed and that the X-Window system operates within users' subjective needs. It is also concluded that the RODB cannot provide the required level of service, even with a two-order of magnitude (100 fold) improvement in speed

Fault tolerance distributed computing

Issued as Funds expenditure reports [nos. 1-4], Quarterly progress reports [nos. 1-3], and Final report, Project no. G-36-63

Software Management Environment (SME) installation guide

This document contains installation information for the Software Management Environment (SME), developed for the Systems Development Branch (Code 552) of the Flight Dynamics Division of Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). The SME provides an integrated set of management tools that can be used by software development managers in their day-to-day management and planning activities. This document provides a list of hardware and software requirements as well as detailed installation instructions and trouble-shooting information