Architecture and Real-Time Systems (ARTS) Laboratory

CASA Rapids

Center for the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) develops networks of short-range radars that would allow to overcome effects of the Earth's curvature that prevent long-range radars from scanning lower parts of the atmosphere. The networks are built using a new approach, called Distributed Collaborative Adaptive Sensing (DCAS): a large number of small radars operate collaboratively within a dynamic information technology infrastructure, adapting to changing atmospheric conditions in a manner that meets competing end user needs.

The CASA RAPIDS suite of software for monitoring, testing and validating real-time distributed systems has been developed to serve as a common platform for carrying out tasks that are crucial to the success of the DCAS system development:

• Monitoring. Ability to monitor an extensive set of the system events. A comprehensive graphical interface allows users to monitor the behavior and health of the real system.
• Integration and test. Software modules developed by various thrusts (primarily distributing, prediction and end-user thrusts) can be integrated and tested for their interoperability.
• Verification/validation. A first-level validation of system goals can be carried out, before the system is deployed in the field.
• Experimentation. Various “what-if” scenarios can be evaluated to help answer important futuristic questions:
  • How will the system scale up?
  • How will the system react to workload increases or node failures?

The manual on RAPIDS can be found here.

The following tutorials provide detailed information about RAPIDS:

• Experiment: Step By Step. This tutorial describes the experiment flow from the technical point of view: what are the various RAPIDS components involved in the experiment and what is their functionality.
• Events Hierarchy. All data collected by RAPIDS is represented as events. All existing types of events are described in this tutorial. Also, there is a document providing details on how RAPIDS events are generated by DCAS applications and which mechanisms are used to report the events to RAPIDS.
• RAPIDS Server. This tutorial covers algorithms of the RAPIDS server operation, as well as various implementation details.
• Local Monitoring Module (LMM). LMMs are small though sophisticated applications that run on nodes of the DCAS system and collect information about utilization of the system resources, flow of the radar data etc. Details about their design and implementation are presented in this tutorial.