Workshop on Dependable Middleware-Based Systems

Wednesday, June 26, 2002
Hyatt Regency Hotel, Bethesda, Maryland, USA

Part of Dependable Systems and Networks Conference (DSN 2002)


While middleware technologies, such as CORBA, EJB and DCOM, are gaining adoption is most application domains, there is still some reluctance in deploying middleware in mission-critical systems with high dependability requirements. Recognizing the need for dependable middleware, several research, industrial and standardization efforts have focussed independently on specific pieces of this dependability puzzle, but have not collectively attempted to solve the entire puzzle. One specific objective of this one-day Workshop is to bring together the leading researchers and practitioners (and therefore, the pieces of the puzzle) in this area, to discuss their insights on dependable middleware, along with the open issues and the challenges that they still face. To this end, some of the presentations at WDMS 2002 will cover practical experiences with, and lessons learned in using and testing, dependable middleware in the field; yet other presentations will uncover novel research ideas that are on the cutting edge in the design and implementation of dependable middleware.

Because there is an equally increasing need for middleware-based systems to exhibit, in addition to dependability, many other "-ilities" (such as survivability, adaptability, scalability, availability, mobility, security, real-time, etc.), another objective of this Workshop is to look at the composition of various other interesting "-ilities" with dependability. Some of the presentations will be aimed specifically at discussing the marriages of real-time with dependability, live upgrades with dependability, etc. We expect that future research on reliable middleware will be founded on some of the ideas that will be presented at this Workshop, and those that will inevitably arise from the discussions that follow.

In keeping with the true open spirit of a Workshop, WDMS 2002 is intended to serve as a forum for fostering free-spirited technical exchanges and healthy debate. Practitioners from industry and researchers from academia will present their latest practices, ideas, technologies, standards and systems for building dependable middleware-based applications. These presentations will set the stage for the Workshop participants to explore, collectively, ways of making today's middleware technologies more robust, and to investigate the enhancement of existing dependable middleware with other "-ilities".



WDMS 2002

June 26, 2002
Washington D.C.


Program Co-Chairs

Priya Narasimhan
Carnegie Mellon University
Pascal Felber
Institut EURECOM, France

Program Committee

Dave Bakken
Wash. State Univ., Pullman
Roy Friedman
Technion, Israel
Benoit Garbinato
Sun Microsystems
Rachid Guerraoui
EPFL, Switzerland
Isabelle Rouvellou
IBM Research, New York
Rick Schantz
BBN Technologies
Doug C. Schmidt
UC, Irvine & DARPA


Original Call for Papers


8.30 am - 10.10 am : Fault-Tolerant CORBA
Chair: TBD


8.30am : Adding Real-Time Support To Fault-Tolerant CORBA
*B. Natarajan, *N. Wang, *C. Gill, **A. Gokhale, ***D. C. Schmidt, ****J. K. Cross, ****C. Andrews, and ****S. J. Fernandes, *Washington Univ., St. Louis, **Vanderbilt University, ***UC, Irvine, and ****Lockheed Martin Tactical Systems, St. Paul
8.50am : Characterization Approaches for CORBA Systems by Fault Injection
E. Marsden, J.-C. Fabre and J. Arlat, LAAS, France
9.10am : A Configurable CORBA Gateway for Providing Adaptable System Properties
M. Seri, T. Courtney, M. Cukier, V. Gupta, S. Krishnamurthy, J. Lyons, H. Ramasamy, J. Ren, and W. H. Sanders, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
9.30am : Building and Evaluating an FT-CORBA Infrastructure
D. Szentivanyi and S. Nadjm-Tehrani, Linkoping Univ, Sweden
9.50am : Online Upgrades for Java and CORBA
L. A. Tewksbury, S. Oberg, L. E. Moser & P. M. Melliar-Smith, Eternal Systems, Inc., Santa Barbara

10:10 am - 10:30 am : Coffee Break (20 mins.)

10.30 am - 12.30 am : Dependability and Other "-ilities"
Chair: TBD


10.30am : A Two-Tier Approach To Building Dependable Middleware Services
P. D. Ezhilchelvan and N. A. Spiers, University of Newcastle, England
10.50am : Middleware Support for Pervasive Dependability
C. Fetzer and K. Hogstedt, AT & T Labs
11.10am : Reachability Snapshots in the Presence of Failures: An Exercise in Protocol-Service Composition
S. Gutierrez-Nolasco and N. Venkatasubramanian UC, Irvine
11.30am : A Middleware Service for Dynamic System Reconfiguration in Real-Time Fault-Tolerant Distributed Object Computing Systems
J. Liu and K. H. Kim, UC, Irvine
11.50am : Middleware Policies for Intrusion Tolerance
F. Webber, P. Pal, C. Jones, M. Atighetchi and P. Rubel, BBN Technologies
12.10pm: Wrap-Up of Morning Sessions (20 mins.)

12:30 pm - 2.00 pm Lunch (90 mins.)

2.00 pm - 3.00 pm : Transactions
Chair: TBD


2.00pm : Deterministic Scheduling and Online Recovery for Replicated Multithreaded Transactional Servers
R. Jimenez-Peris and M. Patino-Martinez, Technical Univ. of Madrid, Spain
2.20pm : Strong Replication in the GLOBADATA Middleware
L. Rodrigues, H. Mitanda, R. Almeida, J. Martins & P. Vicente Univ. de Lisboa, Portugal
2.40pm : Transactional Attitudes: Reliable Enterprise Application Integration Using Web Services
T. Mikalsen, S. Tai & I. Rouvellou IBM Research, Yorktown

3.00 pm - 4.00 pm : Practical Experiences
Chair: TBD


3.00pm : Lessons Learned From Using Adaptive DOC Middleware in Real Application Contexts
*C. Gill, **J. Loyall, **R. Schantz and ***D. C. Schmidt, *Washington University, St. Louis **BBN, ***UC, Irvine
3.20pm : Realizing Software Fault Tolerance in Radar Systems Through Fault Tolerant Middleware and Fault Injection
*D. M. Blough, T. D. Bracewell, J. Cooper and R. Oravits, *Georgia Tech Raytheon Army SMDC
3.40pm : Testability of Complex Middleware-Based Systems
*D. M. Wells, **R. E. Bernstein and ***A. Vadlamudi, *Open Group, **Lockheed Martin Corporation, ***System/Technology Development Corporation