N092-121 TITLE: Minimally Intrusive Real-time Software Instrumentation Technologies

TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Information Systems

ACQUISITION PROGRAM: Future Navy Combat System, Advanced Capability Build(ACB) 14, DDG 1000

The technology within this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign nationals, their country of origin, and what tasks each would accomplish in the statement of work in accordance with section 3.5.b.(7) of the solicitation.

OBJECTIVE: Define and develop novel approaches to provide minimally intrusive software instrumentation technologies for real-time capture and run-time analysis of status, statistics, and domain specific data in support of adaptive management of software within complex mission critical Navy surface combat systems.

DESCRIPTION: Current surface Navy combat systems are often distributed, running on a set of computers connected by a network or a set of networks, and are increasingly becoming more complex. As this complexity increases there is a corresponding decrease in the ability to understand and manage the software components in these systems. A key to improving understanding of these software systems is the use of instrumentation technologies to collect internal application status, statistics, and data at run-time. This collected data and information can then be used by management software to make decisions about the control and allocation of the software components to specific computers within the system and possibly to help with prediction of system software faults and failures. The resulting improvement in software management will enhance affordability of these systems in terms of software maintainability and in terms of reduced maintenance personnel tasks.

The components in these Navy systems support real-time and/or near real-time requirements. A unique and critical requirement is that any developed instrumentation technologies must not perturb the overall functionality of the system. The challenge will be developing technologies that will not severely impact the timing requirements and constraints of the system applications. It therefore is crucial that the developed instrumentation technologies be lightweight and low-overhead in terms of processor, memory and network usage. It is important to clearly understand specific impact/overhead of the developed technologies.

Currently at least one surface Navy program is developing a software system that depends on component /application profile data to make initial component allocation decisions. The instrumentation technologies developed as a result of this SBIR topic, would be applicable in creating these application profiles and in providing critical run-time health and status information for use by an adaptive software management system. This will allow for the extension of the software for this Navy system and future systems to provide dynamic allocation of applications to hardware resources, as needed, while the system is running.

Technologies which are developed as a result of this SBIR topic must provide specific detail on the usage overhead within the a real-time, mission critical system so that application developers as well as test and certification agents can understand this impact and account for it in their requirements, design, development, test, and assessment processes.

These identified technologies must include the definition of a novel architectural approach to facilitate the distribution and analysis of the collected data.

These technologies need to be able to flexibly accommodate a variety of data from the software applications. A critical challenge will be the defining of metadata for the purpose of identifying data labels, data types, and units-of-measure of the instrumented data collected and to create algorithmic expressions that allow the collected instrumentation data from different sources to be combined to create composite information about the running processes.

Each of the defined and developed technologies must be able to respond to a variety of conditions to dynamically recognize allocation, reconfiguration, and failure scenarios.

Future enhancements of this work would include development of technologies to use the data to predictively determine when software within the system is headed towards a degraded or failure state.

PHASE I: Analyze problem space, identify or define a set of specific instrumentation technologies, develop initial concept design and deliver a plan of action for development of the set technologies that meet the need for unobtrusive real-time software instrumentation.

PHASE II: Creat a plan for development and practical deployment of the technologies identified in Phase I. Develop an experimental prototype of the technologies defined in Phase I and integrate with a representative real-time surface Navy software system. Analyze execution overhead for developed interfaces included in the technology.

PHASE III: Develop a set of products based on the work completed in Phase I and II and participate in their transition into Navy systems. Where possible these new technologies should be designed so that they run on standards-based middleware consistent with Navy Open Architecture objectives.

PRIVATE SECTOR COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL/DUAL-USE APPLICATIONS: The developed technology will have applications to any distributed computing software where it is important to understand and utilize the run-time performance and domain specific information to help make the system more adaptable, scalable and survivable.

REFERENCES:
1. Navy Open Architecture Computing Environment Design Guidance, August 23, 2004; http://www.nswc.navy.mil/TIE/OACE/docs/OACE_Design_Guidance_v1dot0_final.pdf

2. Run-time monitoring of real-time systems; Chodrow, S.E.; Jahanian, F.; Donner, M.; Real-Time Systems Symposium, 1991. Proceedings., Twelfth;Volume , Issue , 4-6 Dec 1991 Page(s):74 - 83.

3. Verification of instrumentation techniques for resource management of real-time systems; Tan, Z., Welch, L., Leal, W.; Journal of Systems and Software;Volume 80 , Issue 7 (July 2007); Pages 1015-1022.

KEYWORDS: instrumentation; adaptive software management

** TOPIC AUTHOR (TPOC) **

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