UMD MARUTI

Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland 20742
U.S.A.


Index



The Maruti 3.1 System Architecture


Background

The purpose of the Maruti project is to create an environment for the development and deployment of critical applications with hard real-time constraints in a reactive environment. Such applications must be able to execute on a platform consisting of distributed and heterogeneous resources and operate continuously in the presence of faults.

The Maruti project started in 1988. The first version of the system was designed as an object-oriented system with suitable extensions for objects to support real-time operation. The proof-of-concept version of this design was implemented to run on top of the Unix operating system and supported hard and non-real-time applications running in a distributed, heterogeneous environment. The feasibility of the fault-tolerant concepts incorporated in the design of Maruti system were also demonstrated. No changes to the Unix kernel were made in that implementation, which was operational in 1990. We realized that Unix is not a very hospitable host for real-time applications, as very little control over the use of resources can be exercised in that system without extensive modifications to the kernel. Therefore, based on the lessons learned from the first design, we proceeded with the design of the current version of Maruti and changed the implementation base to CMU Mach which permitted more direct control of resources.

Most recently, we have implemented Maruti directly on 486 PC hardware, providing Maruti applications total control over resources. The initial version of the distributed Maruti has also been implemented, allowing Maruti applications to run across a network in a synchronized, hard real-time manner.

Design Goals

The design of a real-time system must take into consideration the primary characteristics of the applications which are to be supported. The design of Maruti has been guided by the following application characteristics and requirements:

Design Approach and Principles

Maruti is a time-based system in which the resources are reserved prior to execution. The resource reservation is done on the time line, thus allowing for reasoning about real-time properties in a natural way. The time-driven architecture provides predictable execution for real-time systems, a necessary requirement for critical applications requiring hard real-time performance. The basic design approach is outlined below:

Principal Investigators

Research Programmers

Current Visitors

Graduate Students

Recent Alumni

Contact Information

Dr. Ashok Agrawala
agrawala@cs.umd.edu
+1 (301) 405-2525

Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
U.S.A.

Fax: +1 (301) 405-6707


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