Cronus: A Testbed for Developing Distributed Systems

Planners have recognized for some time the potential of distributed architectures for supporting the requirements of Command and Control (C2) systems. One area where distributed system technology is maturing is that of a distributed operating system (DOS). Cronus is a DOS that integrates interconnected heterogeneous computers. The DOS establishes a distributed architecture and facilitates the development and operation of application programs requiring the resources of multiple machines for reasons of functionality, interoperability, survivability, scalability, and performance. We are now in the early stages of an evaluation phase where we are applying the Cronus system concepts and support base to prototype C2 applications. The intent is to use specific application scenarios to demonstrate the utility of distributed system technology for a variety of C2 problems. In this paper we provide an overview of the Cronus system architecture, discuss the emerging C2 experiment, and describe our current testbed configuration.