A CSL view of applications, portability, scalability, and interoperability

he Computer Systems Laboratory (CSL) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), part of the U.S. Government’s Department of Commerce, has promoted portability, scalability, and interoperability of applications through conformance testing and measurement activities and through support of voluntary industry standards development. The first Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) adopted for Federal government use was the voluntary industry standard for ASCII. CSL’s view of portability, scalability, and interoperability stems from a pragmatic approach to the information technology (IT) market. CSL, along with organizations involved in the voluntary industry standards process, is striving to help define and promote interface, protocol, data format, services, and other standard specifications that will broaden the base of portable, communicating applications within the Federal inventory, and that will enhance the competitiveness of U.S. industry in the world market. CSL is actively involved in the evolution of portable, scalable, and interoperable environments that will support mission-critical applications in numerous domains. CSL views portability as providing the mechanism to move applications, including software, data, users, and documents, from one platform to another with minimum changes or training requirements. Scalability extends the portability concept to broaden the operating environments in which an application can execute, for example, from standalone personal computers to massive, distributed, client/server systems. Interoperability provides the capability for applications to communicate with each other reliably and to exchange information both syntactically and semantically. CSL’s limited resources will be most effectively used in the future by focusing on interoperability, especially by providing leadership in conformance testing. The mix of standards and other specifications applied to specific environments for development of new systems and integration of legacy systems will require the continued cooperation of industry, government, and academia. Through the definition of standard interfaces, services, data formats, and protocols, and the implementation of conformance testing, consumers can receive a measure of assurance that products meet standard requirements. sv T