Using distributed resource management in heterogeneous telecomputing platforms

Programmability, reliability, and scalability are system requirements that are essential to retaining or establishing the high ground in the new world order for telecommunications solutions. For telephony systems to be successful in the next century, they must deliver "fifth-generation software flexibility" that enables interoperability while satisfying these 3 key requirements to give customers the applications they need, when they need them. Further, these requirements must be designed into an open system architecture from the start: systems lacking them cannot be easily extended to leverage their combined advantages. Finally, these solutions must readily build upon inexpensive, off-the-shelf hardware components. Telecommunication is becoming telecomputing. Although traditional fault-tolerance approaches can be used to increase the reliability of the platform, a more general software fault-tolerant architecture is required to integrate new off-the-shelf system components reliably and seamlessly into the existing service. The ease of integration hinges both on the system architecture and on easy programming paradigms to integrate dependability with the service functionality. This paper describes our working prototype of an open telecomputing system based on these architectural principles.