The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 801 South Wright Street Urbana, Illinois 61801
Andrew A. Chien
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois
1304 West Springfield Avenue
Urbana, Illinois 61801
Phone: 217-333-6844
Fax: 217-244-6500
Email: achien@cs.uiuc.edu
Level of Participation 25%
http://www-csag.cs.uiuc.edu/projects/agileO.html
Agile Objects can increase the flexibility and survivability of high performance distributed systems. The Agile Objects project's goal is to develop a range of technologies which enhance the capabilities of applications based on distributed or component object models transparently. Specifically, Agile Objects will allow component-based applications to be 1) distributed without concern for performance, 2) dynamic redistributed in response to environmental changes, 3) the achieve that redistribution while providing hard real-time performance guarantees, and 4) have dynamically changing internal interfaces which increase the difficulty of electronic attack.
Increasing large-scale use of component object frameworks presents an opportunity for middleware infrastructures which can automatically provide dramatically greater software system flexibility and thereby survivability. We will develop a framework called Agile Objects which leverages component object models and enables the construction of survivable systems that support flexible, online reconfigurability without additional effort by system designers or implementors. The project will produce sound theoretical bases for flexible distributed systems with hard real-time performance guarantees, and significant dynamic reconfiguration capability. For these elements, survivability is enhanced by reconfigurability or "physical agility". In addition, we will explore frameworks for coordinated signature mutation, providing "logical agility" at interfaces, and thereby increasing the difficulty of compromising an interface by removing the binding site for attacking viruses.
To support flexible distributed systems, we will develop high performance distributed object systems which reduce the remote/local invocation performance differences dramatically, allowing object distributions to be performance independent. This not only allows applications to be designed with no specific distributed configuration in mind, but also increases the configuration flexibility viable for hard real-time systems. To support such flexibility and agility while preserving hard real-time performance guarantees, we will extend the open real-time systems theory developed in the Quorum EPIQ project to allow online migration and reconfiguration of application tasks. Finally, we will explore coordinated signature mutation and object migration schemes which increase information survivability without explicit programmer efforts. This approach can be though of as dynamic and automatic wrappers, and enables interfaces to be elusive both in structure and location.
New Start
The major objectives for the fiscal 1999 year for the Agile Objects project are:
New Start
Prepared July 1998
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