ACE and TAO Success Stories

ACE and TAO are being used in thousands of commercial products at many companies, as well as at various universities and research labs around the world, in many types of distributed, real-time, and embedded systems, particularly telecom, medical, aerospace, defense, and financial services. Our research group has personally worked with thousands of contributors, dozens of end-user companies, and over a half-dozen commercial support providers using ACE and TAO on UNIX, Win32, and embedded platforms. Our experiences and lessons learned using ACE and TAO on these projects are documented online.

ACE and TAO have been used and enhanced by hundreds of developers at many companies and universities in over 40 countries in the world. If you're interested in learning more about how ACE and TAO are being used in practice, or if you'd like to explain how you are using ACE and TAO, please send email to the ace-users@list.isis.vanderbilt.edu mailing list. The following is a list of some known uses of ACE and TAO. See the TAO Press Releases and OCI's OMG meeting briefing for more information on TAO's use in commercial projects in many domains.

Telecommunications and Network Management

ACE and TAO are used inside the 3rd generation mobile base stations called NodeB developed by Siemens AG, Information and Communication Mobile.
ACE is used for PBX monitoring applications at Ericsson, Cypress California.
ACE is used for a distributed computing infrastructure and gateway communication for mobile communications systems at Motorola Iridium, Phoenix, Arizona.
Innovation Media Solutions uses TAO for inflight entertaining and communication systems.
ACE is used for network management at ARINC.
CommWorks Corp., a 3Com company, developed its next-generation VoIP media gateway, the TCH2000, with ACE. ACE facilitated the development of a SPARC Solaris-based simulation of the media gateway for the purpose of rapid development. Over 95% of the code run in simulation also runs without modification on its PPC VxWorks target. Design to a demonstrable system took less than six months in large measure to the efficiency gains won by ACE-based simulation.
TAO is used by Spectrum Signal Processing in their SDR-3000 and HCDR-1002 product families of software defined radio subsystems.
CUseeMe Networks, Inc use ACE and TAO in their CUseeMe Conference Server, a software-based H.323 MCU, enabling standards-based group conferencing with a variety of endpoints. The server uses a Reactor to handle all T.120 protocol communication, and a Proactor to handle the huge numbers of RTP/RTCP audio and video datagrams. Also, an ACE_Task is used as a thread pool for mixing audio packets. TAO is being used to configure and monitor the server.
Telesoft S.p.A., a company owned by Telecom Italia that produces telecommunications software, is using ACE to provide a general network API that hides the underlying communication mechanism.
GlobeTOM has used TAO to develop a product to perform generic network mediation using the Monfox Dynamic TMN toolkit to implement Q3 interfaces to network elements and support CMIS (CMIP/RFC1006) communication to the network resources of customers. They are using ACE together with a proprietary Business Process Logic engine to perform intelligent abstraction of the underlying network resource diversity to present the customer with a homogeneous view of their hetereogeneous network. This ACE-based solution is now successfully managing Alcatel, Motorola and Siemens GSM radio equipment as well as Siemens Switching and UMTS equipment.
DSC Communications Corporation is using ACE in the development of an Element Management System for their Litespan network elements.
ACE is being used at CSC Communications Industry Services on projects including, cellular switch provisioning, real time rater, credit and collections, GUI integration with UNIX, and a credit bureau interface.
Balisoft Technologies is developing a Call Center integration for its LiveContact product using ACE as an infrastructure. ACE provides events dispatching, TCP/IP communications, distributed logging and dynamic service configuration. The software allows internet surfers to contact customer service call centers without having to place a telephone call offline or wait for e-mail.
Infinite Technology, Inc. has built a routing engine on Solaris to support a VoIP network of gatekeepers and gateways. They have used the following patterns very successfully: ACE Thread Pools (the ACE_Task pattern), ACE CStrings, ACE threads (from ThreadManager::spawn()), ACE Singleton, ACE Token, ACE_Allocator_Adapter >, and last but not the least, ACE_Atomic_Op to support a reference counting scheme. The project was finish in on time, within budget, and far exceeding client performance expectations on the running process.
ACE is being used to develop communications software at LCI International, which is the 6th largest long distance carrier in the US.
Titan Client/Server Technologies is using ACE to develop a highly distributed system that is responsible for managing the encryption (and eventual decryption at the consumer end) of analog or digital audio in a Direct To Home consumer television market.
ETC Ltd (London UK) recently completed a high profile project at Cable & Wireless in the UK using ACE, which provides a real time multithreaded gateway between a Remedy ARS system and a Microsoft SQL server system. ACE made is easy to port the code to both Solaris and NT. In addition, the design patterns provided by ACE are used as exemplars for new design work.
Comverse Network Systems is using ACE as a basis for the infrastructure in a large scale telephony project. Comverse develops a platform that gives various services such as voice mail, call completion and forwarding, messaging and different telephony protocols.
Bell South Cellular Corp is using ACE to write a trouble ticket processing system for cellular telephone customers to report problems. This system involves remote PC/Windows client and acess to mainframes via an external Unix gateway. ACE is used for (1) TCP communication to the PC clients and thehost system gateway and (2) multi-threaded programming support and signal programming for the servers.
Objective Systems Integrators, Folsom, CA, have used ACE to build a network management platform for SNMP and CMIP.
ACE is being used in a product at Ericsson Radio.
ACE is being used by reachNET to create the worlds first wireless communications network for the deaf. By using a small wireless device the deaf user will be able to conduct a TTY (TDD) call when away from their wire line equipment. They have created an ACE-based server combining the wireless network switch with a large bank of special TTY modems.
ACE is being used at Tadiran Telecommunications, the biggest in Israel supplier of telecommunications equipment, to build performance monitoring tools for phone switching devices.
ACE was successfully used in the development of an Ethernet to ATM edge forwarder emulation software tool (Lanscape) at Newbridge Networks Inc. in a multithreaded Solaris environment. The key ACE components used on this project include ACE_Reactor, ACE_Task, ACE_Event_Handler, ACE_Timer_Queue.
ACE is being used at Cisco Systems for development of Network Management Applications and products, including the CSR-1 carrier routing system.
ADC Apex using ACE to build network management applications. They are also looking at TAO as a possible alternative for Orbix which is currently used for their distributed applications.
Nortel Networks and Motorola Computer Group (hardware) announced a collaboration to support advanced Internet product development. It runs on Motorola's chips and Nortel's Open IP routing software, which is developed using ACE.
ACE+TAO are being used by Northrop Grumman and Boeing on Wedgetail, which is an Australian airborne early warning & control (AEW&C) system. This AEW&C system combines the new high-performance Boeing 737-700 aircraft with the Northrop Grumman multi-role Electronically Scanned Array (MESA) radar.
Data Kinetics is developing an application called net.Tables that uses ACE to perform table management services across different platforms. The server portion runs on Linux and Windows NT. Clients run on Linux, Win-NT, and Win-95.
ACE is used in the ATM switch Q.93b signaling software at Bellcore, Morristown, New Jersey
ACE is used in an X.25 PVC product at Syncom Systems AB, Uppsala, Sweden
Alcatel recently made a corporate-wide decision to deploy TAO as packaged in OpenFusion TCS. As a major telecom equipment manufacturer, Alcatel is a heavy user of CORBA in its network management products.
COMSAT RSI has been using ACE in building the Network Control Center for the ACeS satellite-based cellular comms system. On this project, ACE was used extensively as OO wrappers over IPC mechanisms, as well as providing a high-level network programming framework to build network management and call processing applications.
TAO is being used in the OSSNet Framework product, which provides comprehensive suite of development tools and a run-time environment for rapidly building and deploying standards-based network managers and agents.
TAO and ACE are being used for network management and a call processing gateway for a "voice over IP" system in the Siemens ICN division in Munich, Germany.
ACE and TAO are being used for a number wireless and wireline telecommunication and data networking embedded systems at Lucent Technologies and Motorola.
TAO is being used in the CMA telecom management agent project, which allows telecom devices to be managed via CORBA interfaces. CMA does for CORBA what SNMP agents do for SNMP.
DIRECTV® uses ACE in it's high-speed broadcast network to insert data circuits into the video stream, and to monitor and control remote broadcast equipment located throughout the US.

Aerospace and Defense

ACE+TAO are being used in the displays subsystem of Raytheon's Ship Self-Defense System (SSDS MK2) on the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier.
TAO and ACE are used for the Run-Time Infrastructure (RTI) for the Defense Modeling and Simulation Organization's (DMSO) High-Level Architecture (HLA) distributed interactive simulation environment at SAIC.
TAO and ACE are used for a number of manned and unmanned real-time avionics mission computing embedded systems at Boeing/McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis, MO. Several successful test flights of Boeing aircraft were recently flown using ACE and TAO.
At JPL, a telemetry infrastructure developed with ACE+TAO framework is being use to process, archive, and distribute the current Cassini Jupiter flyby science data. TAO is being use as the backbone for data acquisition and resource management. ACE is being use to develop the File Exchange Interface as the publish/subscribe and data archiving service, which enables the distribution of processed science product to remote scientists in RealTime. In addition, ACE is also being use for developing a portable OO database wrapper interface.
ACE has been deployed to the 2nd Infantry Division HQs in Korea.
ACE is being used at esystems on the Tier2 Plus project.
ACE is being used in the Distributed Air/Ground Traffic Management (DAG-TM) program, which is a NASA effort that is the testing "free-flight" operating concept that will allow pilots with specially equipped aircraft to choose their own flight paths and provide their own en route separation.
The Boeing Company is using ACE in a Centrifuge training device for the US Navy. The communications and logging facilities of ACE are used to allow five separate computer systems running on different operating systems to communication and operate as one.
The Turkish Navy is using ACE+TAO as the basis for shipboard combat management systems.
ACE is being used on the SIMAE project for the Chilean Air Force to build a Tactical Warfare Simulation System running on SGI Indy workstations using an SGI Indigo as a server.
ACE is used at COMSAT labs in Clarksburg, MD for various satellite control projects.
ACE is used as the main IPC layer in SETAC, a distributed interactive simulation system, used by the Chilean Army as part of the training for batallion and brigade commanders and staffs.
ACE+TAO are being used by Raytheon as the middleware for the mission controls an communications system in the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) project, which is a Boeing 747SP aircraft modified to accommodate a 2.5 meter reflecting telescope, which is the largest airborne telescope in the world.
ACE+TAO are being used by Raytheon as part of the total ship computing environment (TSCE) infrastructure for the DD(X) land attack destroyer program. A TSCE is a coordinated grid of computers that manage many aspects of a ship's power, navigation, command and control, and combat operations.
The Advanced Technology group at Sanders, a Lockheed-Martin Company, is using TAO and ACE to develop the Ground Support System (GSS) for the X33 Single Stage To Orbit (SSTO) Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) prototype: www.venturestar.com. The GSS is responsible for archiving, distributing, and displaying the real-time telemetery from the X33 vehicle and all the Ground Interface Modules (GIMs) which interface with ground fuel storage tanks, etc. The GSS is also responsible for interpreting operator commands, scripted commands, and Reactive Control Logic rules, then forwarding low-level device commands to the vehicle and GIMs.Our software is composed of two major pieces: the operator consoles (which are written in Java and run on NT), and the Command and Data Processor (CDP, which is written in C++ and runs on Solaris). The CDP interfaces with the vehicle and GIMS, logging the data stream (which is around 200000 updates/sec), activating any RCL, and multicasting updates to interested consoles.
The CDP is written using ACE as an OS abstraction to simplify portability between VxWorks and Solaris. TAO provides the CORBA interface to the Java consoles (which use OrbixWeb). Other projects at Sanders are looking at ACE and TAO.
Raytheon Systems Company in St. Petersburg, Florda is using ACE and TAO on the Joint Tactical Terminal (JTT) project. The JTT is an open architecture satellite communications terminal utilized by various armed services. Raytheon is writing embedded C++ that is targeted to a VxWorks operating system running on multiple processors on a VME backplane. Host development of the software is performed on NT workstations and then is ported to VxWorks. The software is developed as a series of software objects which can be "plug and play'd" in various configurations. TAO and its Naming Service are being used as a framework to discover, create, and communicate amonst these objects. Since the software must also be transportable, ACE is used as an O/S abstraction layer. The ability to use ACE on NT and VxWorks will hopefully make "porting" a non-issue.
APTI (part of the Falls Church Division of Raytheon/E-Systems) is using ACE in the implementation of a Client/Server architecture for the control system software for an ionospheric research instrument (IRI) for the Air Force and ONR in Gakona, Alaska.

COTS Middleware Platforms and Products

OMC is using ACE and TAO to develop Brutus, which is a CORBA layer on top of win32 Extended MAPI. Any compliant CORBA client application on any platform has therefore full access to any Microsoft Exchange Server version 5.5 or later on an equal footing with native win32 MAPI applications such as MS Outlook.
ACE+TAO are being used as the core middleware infrastructure for HP's NonStop CORBA product, which has transaction rates in the 80,000 tx/sec with peaks hitting 120,000 tx/sec.
bake, which is an open-source distributed/parallel build tool focusing on correct dependency graph generation, uses ACE for threading and portability issues. It will soon use TAO for communication, as well. bake is a distributed replacement for gmake.
Penta Security Systems in Korea has used ACE to develope certification authority, registration authority in PKI System that deals with RFC2510/RFC2511 protocol. This system was applied to Government PKI of South Korea, and intranet security systems in some banks on AIX, Sun, Linux, and Win32.
ACE and JAWS is used as the basis for an Internet content delivery system at CacheFlow in California.
iCMG has successfully developed K2 Component Server based on CCM specs and ACE+TAO. The K2 Component Server is a server-side infrastructure to develop and deploy CORBA Component written in CORBA 3.0 IDL. It is based on OMG's CORBAComponent Model that includes a Component Model, Container Model, Packaging and Deployment, Component Implementation Framework and Inter-working with EJB 1.1.
ACE is an essential part of a project called Magick, which is an IRC services package.
The K2 Component Server uses IIOP as the base layer is the communication protocol derived from CORBA. Even though, the K2 core implementation is independent from a particular ORB implementation, iCMG has chosen to use ACE+TAO since they provide more services than other commercial ORB vendors.
Vectaport Inc. uses the ACE socket/handler/acceptor framework in ivtools, a layered collection of application frameworks built on InterViews and Unidraw. Three different uses of the ACE mechanisms were incorporated into ivtools, first to add server capability to a stand-alone command interpreter, then to add an import service to drawing editors derived from idraw, and finally to add an interpreted remote control mechanism to the Unidraw framework.
ACE has impacted the design and development of a suite of reliable multicast products that are currently in development by MLDS, Inc.
TAO as packaged as part of PrismTechnologies OpenFusion Total CORBA Solution (TCS).

Big Science

ACE is being used in a control system for an ionospheric research instrument (IRI) which is a large phased array radio-station type of thing (www.haarp.alaska.edu). The array consists of (currently) 48 transmitters, each of which has an embedded controller. These transmitters are all controlled by a central server which runs a number of processes, all of which use ACE for UDP sockets, Shared memory, event scheduling with the Reactor, etc. ACE is also being used in a data acquisition system for Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) sensors (the antenna array can generate ELF in the auroral electrojet, which can be observed on earth).
The Sunrise project is using ACE to control a light-weight solar telescope with a 1m aperture for spectro-polarimetric observations of the solar atmosphere. The telescope is planned to be operated during a series of long-duration balloon flights in order to obtain time series of spectra and images at the diffraction-limit and to study the UV spectral region down to 200 nm, which is not accessible from the ground. The central aim of Sunrise is to understand the structure and dynamics of the magnetic field in the solar atmosphere. Interacting with the convective flow field, the magnetic field in the solar photosphere develops intense field concentrations on scales below 100 km, which are crucial for the dynamics and energetics of the whole solar atmosphere. In addition, Sunrise aims to provide information on the structure and dynamics of the solar chromosphere and on the physics of solar irradiance changes.
The Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea uses TAO to operate the world's largest astronomical observatory.
The Alacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) is a telescope project that is using ACE. The ALMA project will provide scientists with precise images of galaxies in formation seen as they were twelve billion years ago.
The GTC (http://gtc.iac.es) telescope is a high performance segmented 10-meter telescope to be installed in one of the best sites of the Northern Hemisphere: the ORM Observatory (http://www.iac.es/folleto/orm.html). ACE+TAO is being used to develop its control system (GCS). GCS is responsible for controlling the different mechanisms of the telescope, e.g. mount, active optics, instruments, as well as for the data acquisition and adaptive observation scheduling. Specifically, the primary mirror control system may have to work at 200 Hz to maintain alignment of a set of 36 mirror-segments, weighing 400 kg each, within an accuracy of some nanometers. GCS will run on a heterogeneous platform: VME CPU boards with VxWorks for the real-time tier written in C++ and Solaris workstations for the coordinating part and for the user interfaces written in Java. All the nodes are connected by a high speed ATM network.
ACE+TAO provides a uniform architecture, simplifies portability between VxWorks and Solaris, and interoperates with the Java2 ORB to communicate with the user interfaces. The real-time capabilities of TAO are extensively exercised through the use of the Real-Time Event Service to drive the control loops, status monitoring, alarm propagation, etc.
ACE+TAO are being used in a passive radar project at the University of Washington. The instrument in this project relies on an ability to have two receivers synchonously sample at a rate of 250 ksamp/sec for relatively long times (seconds now, minutes later), the trick being that the two receivers are separated by 150 km. ACE+TAO are used multiple times in this project: for the experiment coordination, data transport, and ultimately thread management on the ``supercomputer.''
The BABAR experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center is using both ACE and TAO within selected places of the data acquisition system. We are using ACE transparently via the "CMLOG" software from CEBAF (Jefferson Lab), and in part of our Unix-based event delivery software. In addition, we are using TAO as a mechanism to monitor and control parts of the DAQ system. The code to be monitored/controlled is C++ and the GUI is Java (using JavaIDL). Finally, a distributed histogram package being developed at Caltech will shortly use TAO.
The experiment is a project located on the Stanford University campus and involves a new electron-positron asymmetric collider used to produce large numbers of B and B-bar (anti-B) mesons (you can guess how the collaboration got its name). The physics is focused on investigating differences in the behavior of matter and anti-matter by observing the decay products of the B and B-bar mesons. This project involves over 600 physicists and engineers representing ~80 institutions from 9 countries. Work started in the late 1980s and the first data is scheduled to be collected in the Spring of 1999. The experiment will continue running for five to ten years. More info may be found here:

Finance and Online Financial Services

IG Index uses TAO as the basis for spread betting.
ACXIOM uses TAO to provide customer information and analytics obtained from publically available sources and their clients.
Onix Solutions are using ACE to implement a C++ FIX Engine for the Financial Information eXchange ("FIX") Protocol. One of the most important and complex tasks of a FIX Engine is to manages network connections, and using ACE_Connector, ACE_Svc_Handler, ACE_Acceptor and ACE_Message_Queue enabled this part of the system to be completed after just a few weeks of coding.
ACE is used for distributed insurance claims processing system at CCC, Chicago, Illinois.
ACE is used for a global limiting system at Credit Suisse, Zurich, Switzerland.
Automated Trading Desk uses ACE and TAO as the infrastructure for their online finance services systems.
ACE is being used on Win32, Linux, and Solaris in the Administracion Federal de Ingresos Publicos in its generalized database access server that provides a universal contry-wide platform to access to tax-related information.
Bear Stearns utilizes ACE in Risk Analysis Control System (RACS) to facilitate its server/client UNIX/NT development. RACS is intended to provide overnight and real time theoretical market position calculations to support clearance group and market analysts decisions.
There is a server framework in place that allows creation of multiple independent servers running in dedicated threads and sharing the same executable. Architecture uses Stream, Module, Task, Reactor, Thread_Manager classes. Utilization domain of servers sharing the same address space and running in different threads of control is similar to the one of a shared memory communication between servers, but implementation is much more flexible and cleaner. As an example, we may draw any in-memory data server, that should update (on the fly) historical server of the same data. In our case they share the same repository, which is the only point of contact for these two servers. There are three non-trivial areas in such architecture: signal handling, threads dispatching, network dispatching. Servers register their signals with a dedicated thread running a signal reactor. Each server thread has a dedicated reactor to process network IO and dedicated thread manager to provide effective shutdown and specific resources manipulations. Also every server has its own resource manager to initialize and track down specific resources. Another very interesting and useful application of ACE in our system is Stream class utilization in conjunction with MessageBlock. Stream/Module/Task/MessageBlock provide very efficient redirection of messages and their hierarchical processing, facilitating creation of functional framework with predefined protocol parsers, connector/acceptor factories. This makes possible to concentrate server development on business logic rather than on details of how to communicate with low level network API. Maintenance is another key aspect that is much easier to keep up now, due to a true OO nature of the framework. Modules could be unplugged and adjusted independently (from each other as well as underlying network protocol). If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.
Regards,
Alexander Mintz
Merrill Lynch options trading desk are using ACE Reactor for point to point communication. Our system is a multi-tier architecture which uses both publish/subscribe and point to point.

Management and Control Systems

ACE and TAO are being used by Thales and Selex in the next-generation European air traffic management system, which is known as Co-flight.
ACE and TAO are being used by the European Space Operations Center (ESOC) as part of the Galileo global positioning system.
TAO and CIAO have been the underlying technologies successfully used by the ARCOS Project, a research effort developed carried out in the Pos-Graduation Program on Mechatronics of Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. ARCOS is a vertical, highly configurable framework for the construction of predictable and interoperable Distributed Industrial Supervision and Control (D-S&C) Systems and makes intensive use of many TAO+CIAO features, such as the Real-Time Event Service, Scheduling Service, DAnCE and the programmatic use of ReDaC.
Gottwald uses TAO for shipping port management systems, e.g., integrating terminal management and logistics.
Imaging Business Machines uses TAO for high end color image capture of documents and meaningful data at full track speed, e.g., automaticlaly organize documents by transition and capture MICR, OCR/ICR, and barcode information.
ACE is used by Peopleware to develop a general-purpose event gathering and control system that can be used to implement a complete SCADA system, or to monitor heterogeneous servers and applications. This product is called Osmius and is an open source initiative.
Allied Signal is using ACE on a secondary air traffic control system for the new Hong Kong airport. The system monitors approaching aircraft landing on parallel runways. The planes get closer than normally allowed when landing in parallel, so the system is used for finer monitoring than is available with the standard air traffic control systems. The system monitor the departures, since there are many high mountains around this particular airport, so the planes must not deviate too much until they have reached a certain safe height. The system is a collection of NT and Solaris boxes, connected on a private ethernet LAN.
McCain uses TAO for their advanced traffic management systems, e.g., vehicle ID and tracking, signaling, Amber alerts, etc.
Gilbarco and Veeder-Root use TAO to control fueling systems, e.g., pressure and temperature monitoring, emissions control and safety compliance, flow management, and pump/turbine management.
Scanvaegt uses TAO to control machine food processing and packaging services.
Homag uses TAO and CIAO to control machine tools for woodworking.
ACE+TAO are used in home automation system that uses CORBA for interservice communication. The central controller of the system is a SWI-Prolog engine that is wrapped in ACE+TAO code so Prolog can send and react to CORBA events.
Krones is using TAO and ACE in their beer bottling real-time control systems, which process 20-40 images per-second to ensure bottle quality.
ACE is being used for a high-performance data distribution service for Siemens Power Systems Control in Minneapolis, MN.
TAO and ACE are being used in a ``hot rolling mill'' embedded system framework that controls the production of steel for the Siemens ATD division in Erlangen, Germany.
NetAcquire Corporation in Kirkland, Washington is using ACE and TAO as a distributed object framework in its real-time distributed NetAcquire Server products. TAO is being used to support dynamic real-world input/output distributed device configuration and to support NetAcquire Publish/Subscribe. ACE is being used to provide a platform-neutral OS abstraction for NetAcquire Server applications running on the NetAcquire Server RTOS. NetAcquire systems have been deployed in satellite telemetry, aerospace test, remote monitoring, and industrial automation.
ZAG Ljubljana is using ACE to write a Bridge Weigh-in-Motion system SiWIM, a real-time data acquisition and processing system. ACE is used for:
- All TCP/IP and UDP/IP communications between SiWIM Engine and SiWIM Front-End.
- Event logging via ACE_Log_Msg through a callback routine that sends UDP packets to an external event logger program.
- Thread management and synchronisation. Inter-thread communication is performed using ACE_Message_Queue.
The engine currently runs under WinNT4, but ACE was chosen to ease the future porting of the application to a Linux or VxWorks platform.
SoftSmiths is using ACE for its e-Merchant and e-Wheel product suites, which are next-generation seamlessly integrated and scalable Transaction Management Systems solutions for energy companies.

Gaming and Multimedia

Eidos Media uses TAO to separate news from paper, i.e., news gathering, commentary, analysis, etc.
World Fusion is using ACE and TAO to engineer a massively-multiplayer online persistent-world game (a.k.a., MMOG, MMORPG, MMPOW, etc.) called Atriarch. TAO is used for communication between all of our servers. The nature of these types of games requires real-time QoS constraints, as well as fault-tolerance, failover, and load balancing.
Laputan Designs is leveraging ACE in designing and implementing distributed WWW tools and games.
ESC Entertaining uses TAO to manage their hundreds of rendering systems to create visual effects for movies, including the Matrix.
Euphonix uses TAO for broadcast, post production, music, and live performance.
ACE was used by AudioActive to broadcast live audio from the 1997 Grammy awards. The AUDIOACTIVE Internet Audio Server runs Linux on a Pentium-based PC with a modified Web server that supports as many as 100 to 200 real-time audio connections.
Vistas uses TAO to map signs from camera angles at ball parks, e.g., manages time expended, frequency and compensates for angles, players, umps, etc.
Broadbus uses TAO manage remote TV-on-demand, where all programming can be stored in memory for delivery by local cable companies.

R&D Projects

ACE is used by the Software Research Laboratory (SRL), which is a cooperative effort between the NASA Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA) and West Virginia University.
ACE is being used as the networking component of the JX GUI library at Cal Tech.
ACE and TAO are used in the Quality Objects (QuO) middleware for providing quality of service (QoS) in distributed applications. TAO's CORBA Audio/Video Streaming Service is used extensively in the Unmanned Aircraft Vehicle (UAV) demonstration that is built on top of the QuO middleware. In addition, the WSOA project at Boeing Corporation uses QuO on top of TAO for implementing adaptive image delivery.
ACE and TAO are used in the Intrusion-Tolerant Gateway developed as part of the ITUA project. The Gateway provides fault-tolerance, intrusion-tolerance, and soft-realtime/consistency properties to CORBA applications.
ACE and TAO are being used for a DARPA Software enabled controls project at Boeing, Georgia Tech, and UC Berkeley. A Yamaha R-50 Helicopter will be used as the VTOL UAV testbed. Initially, the effort focuses on the development of algorithms and integration of software components from other SEC contractors. The Boeing Open System Architecture, which is based on ACE+TAO and is also known as Boldstroke, provides the distributed computing architecture required to develop and test control algorithms. Boldstroke provides the ideal ether by way of which software algorithms at all levels (high, medium and low) can communicate efficiently across a network of computers. A hardware-in-the-loop simulation of the algorithms will then be performed demonstrating the algorithms. Based on the outcome of this simulated demonstration the algorithms will be tested in unusual flight situations. The helicopter carries an Avionics box with an Inertial Measurement Unit, GPS and computer processors that allow control algorithms to be implemented onboard the UAV. Ground station computers will monitor the UAV during its flight using wireless Ethernet devices.

Healthcare Systems

ACE is being used by a SWi, a healthcare software company in Singapore, to redesign an existing Interface Engine product into a 3 tier client/server architecture.
ACE was used for enterprise-wide distributed medical imaging systems at Kodak in Dallas and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
ACE and TAO are being used by GE for a variety of healthcare systems.
ACE and TAO are being used by Stentorsoft for a variety of radiology systems.
ACE and TAO are used for syngo, which is next-generation medical software framework for Siemens Medical Engineering, Erlangen, Germany.

Data Storage

ACE and TAO are being used at Veritas (now Symantec) as the middleware infrastructure for their distributed storage management systems.
StorageTek is using ACE in a new Storage Management product that will run on MVS. The software development is being done primarily on Windows/NT and Solaris platforms. Prototype code developed on NT and Solaris using ACE has been successfully built and executed on MVS without requiring any change to the source.
SUTMYN Storage Corporation are in the process of deploying TAO as a communication mechanism in a future mass-storage device intended for attachment to IBM plug-compatible mainframes and open systems. A core principle of such mass-storage systems is the separation of data and control paths. TAO will be used as follows:
- in the internal control paths, for traditional object-to-object method invocation, where the objects are constrained to be in different processes, and on different processors within our product
- in the event logging subsystem (it may be possible to use all of the real-time event service), and
- in the external interfaces (those that do not involve data transfer), for controlling and monitoring the device.
TAO will not be used in any data paths.
This system is implemented on an array of Intel-i960-based, custom SBCs running VxWorks, an Intel-x86 subsystem running Solaris 2.6 and some number of SPARC Ultra subsystems running Solaris 2.6. On the subsystems running Solaris, several processes will be deployed on each processor. Since the processes are heavily multithreaded, the thread-per-request style of concurrency will likely be used.

Robotics

RECIPE, which is an image capture and processing system designed for use on autonomous robots at the University of Bonn, Germany.
ACE+TAO are being used in a joint project at the Clinic of Craniofacial Surgery of the University of Heidelberg and the engineers of the Institute of Process Control and Robotics of the University of Karlsruhe to develop a computer and robot-aided operating theatre.

Travel Planning and Reservation Systems

The Weather Channel uses TAO as the basis for their weather.com website.
AirSage is using ACE+TAO to provide an intelligent traffic road map based on online analysis of cell phone signals. AirSage provides comprehensive traffic information. AirSage utilizes anonymous and aggregate signaling data from wireless carrier networks to provide traffic information for metropolitan areas and rural highways throughout the country. Our patented technology delivers traffic speeds, travel times, and other transportation information at a fraction of the cost of traditional traffic monitoring solutions.
TAO is used by the Sabre Travel Network for their online reservation systems.
TAO is used by Travelocity for their online reservation systems.
ACE is used to connect travel agents to travel products and Airline Reservation systems at Travel Industra Automated Systems (TIAS), Australia
MapQuest.com is using ACE to create a server framework from which a few (and all future) servers are derived. By using ACE and some of its frameworks, has made their development process much faster, but also portable.

Testing and Measurement Equipment

Integrated Measurement Systems in Beaverton, Oregon is using ACE in its Vanguard High Speed Digital IC Validation System. A SIMD supercomputer used in the development and test of the next generation of high-end microprocessors. ACE is an integral part of the client server software which allows the Gigabit IC validation system to be accessed from anywhere on the Internet.
ACE is used in a multiplatform tool to test the integrity of system platforms and numerous configurations at Digital Equipment Corp (DEC).
Cadence Design Systems, Inc. is using portions of ACE for a current server that lets multiple application communicate to an Integrated Circuit tester.

Back to the ACE home page.

Last modified 12:03:46 CDT 15 March 2008