Responsive systems: An introduction

Abstract

This paper introduces responsive systems: systems that are real-time, event-based, or time-dependent. There are a number of trends that are accelerating the adoption of responsive systems: timeliness requirements for business information systems are becoming more prevalent, embedded systems are increasingly integrated into soft real-time command-and-control systems, improved message-oriented middleware is facilitating growth in event-processing applications, and advances in service-oriented and component-based techniques are lowering the costs of developing and deploying responsive applications. The use of responsive systems is illustrated here in two application areas: the defense industry and online gaming. The papers in this special issue of the IBM Systems Journal are then introduced. The paper concludes with a discussion of the key remaining challenges in this area and ideas for further work.

Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It? (Release v2021.12.22a)

“…While one CPU is attending to the high-speed real-time computations required to peel one log, the other CPUs might be analyzing the size and shape of the next log in order to determine how to position the next log so as to obtain the greatest possible quantity of high-quality veneer. It turns out that many applications have non-real-time and real-time components [BMP08], so this approach can often be used to allow traditional real-time analysis to be combined with modern multicore hardware.…”

Streaming Process Mining

“…In addition, the amount of events being produced is becoming so vast and complex [22] that storing them for further processing is becoming less and less appealing. To cope with these issues, event-based systems [4] and event processing systems [19] can become extremely valuable tools: instead of storing all the events for later processing, these events are immediately processed and corresponding reactions can be taken immediately. In addition, event-based systems are also responsive systems: this means they are capable of reacting autonomously when deemed necessary (i.e., only when new events are observed).…”

A Step Toward Exploiting Task-Affinity in Multi-Core Architectures to Improve Determinism of Real-Time Streaming Applications

“…However, this scheduler is less effective on the management of cooperative applications, where a proper exploitation of the memory hierarchy cannot be negletted to better support the data communication among different tasks of a streaming application. Moreover, the scheduling techniques used for competitive tasks execution often lead to some undesirable side-effects, such as an overall loss of predictability [5], which is mandatory when dealing with real-time tasks. Thus, the effective scheduling of cooperative tasks requires an improved efficiency on memory access.…”

“…Moreover, the actual execution time a certain task takes generally varies from one run to another. When we focus on real-time scheduling, which is sensible about determinism [5], these aspects cannot be disregarded. Specifically, it becomes important to precisely identify two metrics: the startup latency, i.e., the maximum latency required to start a task that is ready to run, and the execution time, i.e.…”