APPLICATIONS

One person can now easily supervise distributed systems and applications, using a generic and standardised supervision solution. Poised to become a W3C standard, it won a prestigious SISO (Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization) Euro-SIW 2003 Award for distributed systems simulation. Ask any organisation and you will get the same answer. Supervising networks, systems and applications is tricky – even if you bring together all the different software components required for this task. “It’s possible to interconnect distributed systems for distributed applications. But today’s solutions are expensive, proprietary and too complex for most companies,” says Jean-Eric Bohdanowicz, coordinator of GeneSyS. This recently completed IST project developed middleware architecture for generic systems supervision. The GeneSyS concept uniquely adopts a universal approach to the supervision of distributed systems. “It can supervise all three layers, from the system and network through to applications,” says Bohdanowicz. “Our architecture is generic and addresses the communication problem between different platforms.” To ensure the architecture’s openness and generic aspect, the second prototype of GeneSyS is based on two distinct components: the communication Core and the agents (or supervision plug-ins). “The Core is publicly available and hosted on a server by our partner at Stuttgart University,” says Bohdanowicz. “It can create a catalogue of the services provided by its plug-ins and route communications between plug-ins on the network. It can also summarise the status of the supervised system.” The agents are based on the machines that the system administrator wants to supervise. They control and monitor local and specific system components, and send monitoring data to the Core via a standard format. The agents also receive and apply control instructions from the Core, through the same standard. The software is modular and can be downloaded from the open-source portal SourceForge. By mid-January 2005, some 2,700 people had already downloaded GeneSyS components from this site. “Several companies and universities are using our software to supervise networks and servers,” says the project coordinator. They include two project partners, the High Performance Computing Centre Stuttgart (HLRS), and the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA Sztaki). “The latter uses GeneSyS to check, for example, applications and loads on hundreds of websites in Hungary,” he adds. Bohdanowicz foresees great demand for GeneSys from organisations that collaborate remotely with specialist teams in different areas. His own company, EADS-Space Transportation, helped to validate the software by simulating a docking of the European ATV cargo vessel with the International Space Station. “The software supervised workstations and simulators, providing a global view of the simulation over the Internet.” German partner Navus will commercialise GeneSyS from 2006. “It will aim at small markets, such as distributed applications,” says Bohdanowicz. “EADS could also use the software for distributed simulations of the Ariane rocket, integrating the different facilities and components of our subcontractors.” The project partners recently submitted an official proposal to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), using specifications for the second GeneSys prototype. “The proposal describes a Web services architecture based on a generic system supervision architecture. If W3C says yes, we will begin to make GeneSys a W3C standard via two of our partners,” says Bohdanowicz.