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High Performance CORBA for Real-Time and Embedded Applications

Select ORBexpress RT features
ORBexpress RT has all of the ST product features plus these real-time features:

• Native, highly optimized GIOP/IIOP messaging
  
• Distributed priority inheritance
  
• Priority ceiling locking protocol
  
• Full multi-threading
  
• Real-time thread pools
  
• Fail-over fault resilience
  
• Bounded priority inversions
  
• Predictable ORB internals
  
• Real-time POA
  
• Universal Quality of Service Specification
  
• Priority mapping
  
• Real-Time CORBA 1.0 Support

ORBexpress RT is our Real-Time CORBA implementation and the flagship product in the ORBexpress product family. Used for the development of hard real-time systems, where reliability and predictability are critical, ORBexpress RT goes beyond the Real-Time CORBA 1.0 standard and provides a development environment uniquely suited to building fast, reliable distributed systems that are predictable from end-to-end.

Developed by real-time experts, ORBexpress RT internals are designed for maximum performance and deterministic behavior. ORBexpress RT can be used by developers building applications with hard deadlines, such as those found in avionics and process control. These communities require maximum performance and deterministic capabilities and they choose ORBexpress RT because it offers

• Priority propagation reducing inter-system priority inversion problems
  
• Fault resilient connections between the client and server allowing servers to be started with multiple endpoints and enabling redundant networks
• Replaceable transports allowing developers to "plug-in" predictable custom transports
  
• Quality of service allowing the control of upper bounds on latency and jitter

Choose ORBexpress RT if you:

• Use the native thread priorities in your operating system, or
  
• Want to control and bound the resources used by the ORB, or
  
• Want to control the Quality of Service parameters to optimize use of your transport, or
  
• Have requirements to build a predictable distributed system.
  
  
  

Write Predictable Transports with ORBexpress RT
ORBexpress RT provides developers with the ability to plug-in additional transport technologies. ORBexpress RT will then use these user-installed transports using standard GIOP protocol. If the plug-in transport is a real-time, predictable transport then the high predictability and priority-respecting behavior of ORBexpress RT allows for developers to construct highly predictable distributed Real-time CORBA applications.

An ORBexpress RT developer can plug-in custom transports to run GIOP on top of VME bus, ATM, Shared Memory, UDP, FireWire, or even a project proprietary bus. With open APIs, developers can write their own transports or let us do the work.

Keep Your Priorities Straight
The ORBexpress RT Distributed Priority Inheritance™ capability greatly reduces the intersystem priority inversion problems that can plague complex distributed, real-time systems. Distributed Priority Inheritance allows servers to run requests at the client's priority. The internal algorithms in ORBexpress are carefully designed to minimize and bound priority inversions. Ceiling locking protocols are applied where appropriate to avoid priority inheritance deadlocks.

Predictable Memory Pool
The ORBexpress predictable memory pools are used for ORB internal allocations and deallocations as well as application-created CORBA object allocations and deallocations. These memory pools provide your developers with consistent, bounded allocation and deallocation times and prevent the fragmentation of memory over long time periods. Typical execution times for the allocation/deallocation cycle using the ORBexpress predictable memory pools are four to six times faster than the default heap memory mechanisms.

Fault Resilient Connections
ORBexpress facilitates fault resilient connections between a client and server. Servers can be started with multiple endpoints to enable redundant networks. If a connection between a client and server cannot be made on the first attempt, ORBexpress will retry according to user-defined settings such as an alternate connection. You can start redundant servers, allowing clients to transparently fail-over to one of the redundant servers if the current server fails. This feature, combined with the transport failover feature, provides tolerance of server system, server process, and transport path failure.

Many existing non-real-time comunications protocols (eg. TCP) are inherently unpredictable. Real-time predictability in ORBexpress is achieved in a distributed system by combining the appropriate O/S and communications technologies that are capable of achieving the desired timeliness properties.

Universal Quality of Service Specification
Since real-time behavior is about more than just priority, ORBexpress provides a universal quality of service specification that can represent any network transport. This easy-to-use representation allows you to maintain upper bounds on latency and jitter and guarantee bandwidth. This also allows you to maximize performance from your transport while still gaining the benefits of standardized middleware.

Fast, Scalable, Predictable Dynamic Request Demultiplexing
You can use ORBexpress with very large systems with hundreds or even thousands of IDL interfaces, each of which may have tens of thousands of instances, and still experience fast implementation resolution. This is because of our unique Dynamic Request Demultiplexing, the process that ORBexpress uses to locate the implementation of an object and operation in a server process upon the receipt of a new request. ORBexpress demultiplexing is fast, scales well, and provides predictable, bounded object look-up times.

Minimum Memory Footprint
ORBexpress RT provides a lightweight CORBA implementation without sacrificing performance. We've optimized our memory footprint with embedded device requirements in mind, including network routers and switches, cellphones, and PDAs.

Built for Speed
ORBexpress is an ideal, standards-based replacement for home-grown, proprietary communication protocols. Independent benchmarks have shown that the ORBexpress ORB client and server together add minimal overhead for local and remote operations. The chart below compares the transfer of a varying amount of type "float" data using sockets vs. using ORBexpress.

Results are from the Defense Industry Initiative Common Operating Environment (DII-COE) independent benchmark study.

For example, when sending small, two-way operations (an exercise that is least favorable to a CORBA system) ORBexpress only adds 20% to the round-trip compared to sockets. Other CORBA ORB products add from 200% to 1,100% to the socket times. ORBexpress adds less than 3% when sending larger volumes of data (more than 2K). For more on ORBexpress performance click here.

Reconfigurable
While static memory footprint is important, ORB dynamic memory management greatly affects the ability of the ORB to scale in different environments. We offer ORBexpress RT in two configurations: Standard and Small. This allows developers to optimize the per-connection memory usage according to the application's memory constraints and messaging traffic.

Applications
Examples of real-time systems include telecom switches, avionics systems, process control applications, and medical imaging.

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