Guardian: Decentralized control of an embedded multimicroprocessor

Abstract

Guardian is a real-time, multimicroprocessor operating system intended to be a research testbed for experimentation with decentralized control. It was designed in a Pascal-like language for a target multimicroprocessor that contains six microcomputer processing elements and twelve shared memories fully interconnected by a crossbar switch. Each processing element in the host multimicroprocessor executes Gaurdian tasks that perform shared memory reclamation, internodal communication, health monitoring, task scheduling, fault containment, and distributed debugging. Each node also supports application-callable software primitives for realtime process control, message-based interprocess communication, shared data structure management, and exception handling. The primary goal of Guardian is to demonstrate hard real-time decentralized control of an embedded multimicroprocessor.