Building reliable, high-performance communication systems from components

Although building systems from components has attractions, this approach also has problems. Can we be sure that a certain configuration of components is correct? Can it perform as well as a monolithic system? Our paper answers these questions for the Ensemble communication architecture by showing how, with help of the Nuprl formal system, configurations may be checked against specifications, and how optimized code can be synthesized from these configurations. The performance results show that we can substantially reduce end-to-end latency in the already optimized Ensemble system. Finally, we discuss whether the techniques we used are general enough for systems other than communication systems.