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Lookup NU author(s): Emeritus Professor Santosh Shrivastava, Dr Stuart Wheater
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In a distributed environment, it is inevitable that long running applications will require support for dynamic reconfiguration because, for example, machines may fail, services may be moved or withdrawn and user requirements may change. In such an environment it is essential that the structure of running applications can be modified to reflect such changes. A complication is that such long running applications are frequently composed out of existing applications. The resulting application can be very complex in structure, containing many temporal dependencies between constituent applications. This paper describes an approach that supports the dynamic reconfiguration of large scale distributed applications. An application composition and execution environment has been designed and implemented as a transactional workflow system that enables sets of inter-related tasks (applications) to be carried out and supervised in a dependable manner. A task model that is expressive enough to represent temporal dependencies between constituent tasks has been developed. The workflow system maintains this structure and makes it available through transactional operations for performing changes to it. Use of transactions ensure that changes can be carried out atomically with respect running applications. The workflow system is general purpose and open: it has been designed and implemented as a set of CORBA services to run on top of a given ORB. Appeared in the Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Configurable Distributed Systems (CDS'98), Annapolis, Maryland, USA, May 4-6, 1998.
Author(s): Shrivastava SK, Wheater SM
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: Department of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 1998
Pages: 14
Print publication date: 01/01/1998
Source Publication Date: 1998
Report Number: 645
Institution: Department of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne
URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/645.pdf
