FORGE Project

UC Irvine, Center for Embedded Computer Systems

FORGE: A Framework for Optimization of Distributed Embedded Systems Software

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Methodology

The FORGE framework uses the following three mechanisms for dealing with the specific challenges of DRE systems:

Conceptualization and specification of DRE system requirements including those related to its structure, behavior, and performance/QoS guarantees;
Modeling the available design knowledge (including the elicited requirements and the target platform) using flexible software architecture that are specified via architectural description languages (ADLs)
Targeting flexible and optimizing middleware solutions and operating systems as our implementation platform

The figure shows our vision of the application development model for a complex heterogeneous distributed computing platform. The lowest layer shows an abstract picture of a heterogeneous computing platform consisting of multiple devices connected over wireline/wireless communication links. The second layer shows the architecture description of such a platform, and resource constraint description of the application requirements (such as power budget, real-time constraints etc.). The compiler takes the application functional specification, the ADL, and RDL, generates the services, and middleware configuration shown in the second highest layer, and their deployment information across the platform.

Overall, our approach is to apply systematic method for modeling architectures, through a model-based system specification and to rethink the division of static versus runtime delegation of functionality; we use a middleware infrastructure that is both adaptive and reflective to meet the applications and to dynamically smooth the imbalances between demands and changing environments.

Specifically, we study the integration of the middleware abstraction layer with the hardware/OS level abstraction layer and seek mechanisms for capturing resources and architectures at these levels and mechanisms to allow interactions between the levels. A resource description language (RDL) specifying the composition of the system as well as resource constraints can be used by a compiler for automatically generating the necessary services and middleware configuration and their deployment across the platform.

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_{This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0204028. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendation expresses in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.}