Building reliable, high-performance communication systems from components

Xiaoming Liu, Christoph Kreitz, Robbert van Renesse,

Jason Hickey, Mark Hayden,

Kenneth Birman, Robert Constable

Abstract

Although building systems from components has attractions, this
approach also has problems. Can we be sure that a certain
configuration of components is correct? Can it perform as well as a
monolithic system? Our paper answers these questions for the Ensemble
communication architecture by showing how, with help of the NuPrl
formal system, configurations may be checked against specifications,
and how optimized code can be synthesized from these configurations.
The performance results show that we can substantially reduce
end-to-end latency in the already optimized Ensemble system. Finally,
we discuss whether the techniques we used are general enough for
systems other than communication systems.

17th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'99)

Published as Operating Systems Review 34(5):80-92, Dec. 1999

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