Distributed Real-Time Computing with Harness

Abstract

Modern parallel and distributed computing solutions are often built onto a ''middleware'' software layer providing a higher and common level of service between computational nodes. Harness is an adaptable, plugin-based middleware framework for parallel and distributed computing. This paper reports recent research and development results of using Harness for real-time distributed computing applications in the context of an industrial environment with the needs to perform several safety critical tasks. The presented work exploits the modular architecture of Harness in conjunction with a lightweight threaded implementation to resolve several real-time issues by adding three new Harness plug-ins to provide a prioritized lightweight execution environment, low latency communication facilities, and local timestamped event logging.