Standardization of a Communication Middleware for High-Performance Real-Time Systems

The last several years saw an emergence of standardization activities for real-time systems including standardization of operating systems (series of POSIX standards [1]), of communication for distributed (POSIX.21 [10]) and parallel systems (MPI/RT [5]) and real-time object management (realtime CORBA [9]). This article describes the ongoing standardization work and implementation of communication middleware for high performance real-time computing. The real-time message passing interface (MPI/RT) advances the non-real-time high-performance communication standard Message Passing Interface Standard (MPI), emphasizing changes that enable and support real-time communication, and is targeted for embedded, fault-tolerant and other real-time systems. MPI/RT is the only communication middleware layer that provides guaranteed quality of service and timeliness for data transfers, is also targeted for real-time CORBA to replace RPC layer and for real-time and embedded JAVAs