A study of System Interface Sets (SIS) for the host, target and integration environments of the Space Station Program (SSP)

System interface sets (SIS) for large, complex, non-stop, distributed systems are examined. The SIS of the Space Station Program (SSP) was selected as the focus of this study because an appropriate virtual interface specification of the SIS is believed to have the most potential to free the project from four life cycle tyrannies which are rooted in a dependance on either a proprietary or particular instance of: operating systems, data management systems, communications systems, and instruction set architectures. The static perspective of the common Ada programming support environment interface set (CAIS) and the portable common execution environment (PCEE) activities are discussed. Also, the dynamic perspective of the PCEE is addressed

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

Chemical applications of escience to interfacial spectroscopy

This report is a summary of works carried out by the author between October 2003 and September 2004, in the first year of his PhD studie

A development framework for artificial intelligence based distributed operations support systems

Advanced automation is required to reduce costly human operations support requirements for complex space-based and ground control systems. Existing knowledge based technologies have been used successfully to automate individual operations tasks. Considerably less progress has been made in integrating and coordinating multiple operations applications for unified intelligent support systems. To fill this gap, SOCIAL, a tool set for developing Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) systems is being constructed. SOCIAL consists of three primary language based components defining: models of interprocess communication across heterogeneous platforms; models for interprocess coordination, concurrency control, and fault management; and for accessing heterogeneous information resources. DAI applications subsystems, either new or existing, will access these distributed services non-intrusively, via high-level message-based protocols. SOCIAL will reduce the complexity of distributed communications, control, and integration, enabling developers to concentrate on the design and functionality of the target DAI system itself

Relational-like file structure

The currently operational relational-like structure, as well as a primitive database management system is described. The proposed file structure integrates a B-tree variant, inverted files, and other structures to provide the underlying facility. The database management system supports multi-user, multi-database retrieval through relational views of both data and documents, as well as the interface to non-procedural languages. Emphasis regarding design decisions and tradeoffs were related to: 1) the Unix* operating system; 2) the access methods supported; 3) future development, such as document processing (information storage and retrieval), concurrency control and recovery