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Computer Science Dept. Washington University deuce.doc.wustl.edu/ |
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TEL: (314) 935-4215 One Brookings Drive St. Louis, Missouri 63130-4899 |
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Computer Science Dept. Washington University deuce.doc.wustl.edu/ |
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TEL: (314) 935-4215 One Brookings Drive St. Louis, Missouri 63130-4899 |
Middleware is software that users do not see, but it is key to openness and continued innovation through competition. Its role is to broker the communication between consumers and suppliers. Middleware masks differences between OS platforms and networks. For instance, clients can request a service without knowing where or how that service is implemented. This flexibility will become even more important because the NGI architecture is based on the fundamental premise that unlike today's computer-centric network, tomorrow's Internet will be a heterogeneous mix of cooperative, intelligent devices located in the home, at the factory, in public places, and at the office. These network devices will not just be PCs, they will increasingly be intelligent home appliances and sensors, personal communication devices, entertainment centers, and other novel forms of electronics.
For the Internet to become pervasive, access devices must become very cheap, their use must be intuitive, and distributed computing middleware must do most of the ``thinking'' for the users. Thus, today's network architectures, where applications rely largely on local operating system services, must evolve. This evolution will turn the current computing model inside out -- clients will become very thin, the intelligence will reside in the network, and most applications will be network-centric. Resources can then be shared, to reduce their cost and facilitate maintenance and updates.
Intelligent middleware is the key enabling technology to realize the NGI vision. An open standard by the OMG called CORBA is rapidly gaining mindshare and marketshare in both the research and commercial domains. Unfortunately, first-generation CORBA ORBs did not provide adequate quality of service (QoS) for performance-sensitive NGI applications, such as teleconferencing and Internet telephony, because requests were treated with ``best effort'' response. All NGI applications are not created equal, however. Some must run faster, more reliably and more consistently, e.g., in a predictable time context, than others. In a heterogeneous environment, systems and networks can provide better QoS by prioritizing services. As network providers broaden their bandwidth and service offerings, flexibility becomes increasingly more important, since pricing must be sensitive to both performance and ``class of service'' if it is to reach the widest possible market.
In addition to working closely with our research sponsors on ACE and TAO, many other companies have deployed our middleware in commercial projects and research labs around the world, where it is used for a broad spectrum of systems ranging from telecommunications, medical imaging, avionics, simulation, and financial services. As a testament to our success in technology transfer, a independent company, Riverace, has formed to provide commercial support for ACE and a St. Louis company, OCI, has recently begun to provide commercial support for TAO.
Dr. Douglas C. Schmidt
is the Deputy
Director of Research and Chief Technology Officer at the Software Engineering Institute,
which is a federally funded research and development center
headquartered on the campus of Carnegie
Mellon University. He is on research leave from Vanderbilt University, where he
is a Full Professor in the Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science Department, the Associate Chair of Computer
Science and Engineering, and a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Software
Integrated Systems (ISIS). Dr. Schmidt is an internationally
renowned
and widely
cited researcher whose work focuses on
patterns, optimization
techniques, and empirical analyses of
object-oriented and component-based frameworks and model-driven engineering
tools that facilitate the development of distributed real-time and
embedded (DRE) middleware and applications on parallel platforms running over high-speed networks and embedded system
interconnects. He has published 10
books and over 475 papers in top IEEE, ACM, IFIP, and USENIX technical journals, conferences, and books that
cover a range of topics, including high-performance communication
software systems, parallel processing for high-speed networking
protocols, real-time distributed computing with CORBA, Real-time Java, object-oriented patterns
for concurrent and distributed systems, and model-driven engineering
tools.
Dr. Cytron is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis, where his research
interests include automatic program optimization and transformation
(especially of network software and middleware), voting strategies
suitable for the Internet, and storage-management systems suitable for
object-oriented programs. He received a B.S. in electrical
engineering from Rice University in 1980. His graduate studies at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign resulted in an M.S. in 1982
and a Ph.D. in 1984, both in computer science. Dr. Cytron was a
Research Staff Member at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center from
1984 until 1993.
Dr. Klefstad's research focuses on distributed object computing and
high-performance, real-time ORBs; patterns for object-oriented
communication systems; object-oriented communication software
frameworks; flexible and adaptive distributed, parallel, and
concurrent systems; high-performance communication systems and
protocols. His most recent publications concern the
development of middleware for distributed systems and a
quality-of-service framework for a distributed video application.
Dr. Klefstad received his Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science
from the University of California, 1988.
Dr. Levine was the Director of the Center for Distributed Object Computing in
the Computer Science Department
at Washington University,
St. Louis. He received the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine,
the M.S.E.E./C.S. from George Washington University, and the B.S.M.E.
from Cornell University. His current research interests include
testing and performance analysis of real-time systems, and scheduling
of distributed real-time systems. In addition, Dr. Levine has
contributed substantial amounts to the ADAPTIVE Communication
Environment (ACE) framework and The ACE ORB (TAO). Dr. Levine has extensive industry
experience developing software for broadband telecommunications,
high-fidelity electro-optic sensor system simulation, and both
electric/hybrid and internal combustion engine vehicle applications.
He is a Registered Professional Engineer in the District of
Columbia.
Chris is an Assistant Professor at Washington University who joined
the DOC group from Southwestern Bell. He has ported ACE to the pSoS
real-time operating system and has implemented a strategized
scheduling service for TAO. His Ph.D. focused on a middleware
framework for dynamic and
adaptive
resource management in embedded and real-time distributed object
computing systems.
Andy is an Associate Professor in the EECS Department and a
Senior Researcher in the Institute for Software Intensive
Systems at Vanderbilt
University. As a Ph.D. student at Washington University, Andy
conducted a substantial amount of work developing benchmarks for CORBA performance over ATM
networks. His Ph.D. research contributed many components to TAO -- most notably the various Object Adapter
demultiplexing strategies, IIOP optimizations, and the TAO IDL
compiler. Andy received his Ph.D. in 1998 and worked as a member of
the research staff for Bell Labs at Murray Hill.
Jeff graduated with a BS in Computer Science from Washington
University and is a full-time staff member in the DOC group at
Washington University working on TAO's IDL compiler, its Interface
Repository, and many other odds and ends. As an undergrad, Jeff
provided the original TAO Dynamic Any implementation, as well as a
DII/DSI application using TAO. He also developed an extensive
regression IDL compiler test suite to validate TAO's features. In
addition to being a full-time staff member, Jeff is a CS Masters grad
student at Washington University.
Jai is a graduate student at ISIS where he is working on adding
adding load balancing to TAO, component swapping, and a resource
allocation and control engine for CIAO.
Kitty is a graduate student at ISIS where he is working on
domain-specific modeling languages for the CORBA Component Model
(CCM).
Vanderbilt University Director
Washington University Director
University of California, Irvine Director
Former Washington University Director
Affiliated Faculty and Full-time Staff
Doctoral Students
In addition to Jeff Parsons, whom is a full-time staff and a
doctoral student, the DOC group has the following doctoral students:
MS Students
Funding
Total research funding I've been involved with for the DOC group since
June 1995 is $26,810,443. This funding can be split into two
categories:
A detailed breakdown of the sources of funding is presented below:
Equipment Resources in the DOC Group
The DOC group has excellent facilities and infrastructure to support
distributed object computing research. The networking resources in
the DOC group include:
The computing
resources in the DOC group include:
Our network and computing infrastrucure supports a variety of
multimedia and imaging applications including multi-participant
teleconferencing and collaboration, electronic radiology, and
video-on-demand.The Road Ahead
Now that the Center for Distributed Object Computing is established,
we plan to use it as a vehicle to enhance our partnerships with
various industrial sponsors and other Washington University research
groups, such as Jon Turner
and Guru Parulkar's Applied Research Lab.
Back to Douglas C. Schmidt's home page.
Last modified 11:34:36 CDT 28 September 2006