Mutant hardware/software components for dynamically reconfigurable distributed systems

Subjects:
Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica - Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica - Politecnico di Torino
Dipartimento di Informatica Sistemistica e Comunicazione - Università
degli Studi di Milano Bicocca

Coordinator:
prof. Paolo Prinetto, Politenico di Torino

Web Site

Responsible for the Università di Napoli Unit:
prof. Nicola Mazzocca

Responsible for the MobiLab Group collaboration:
prof. Stefano Russo

Description:
The COMMUTA project aims at defining, constructing and experimenting a distributed reconfigurable architecture based on the possibility of dynamically modifying the hardware and software components of a system.
The most innovative aspect of this project is the ability to handle both hardware and software reconfigurability using Mobile Agents.
The COMMUTA project pushes the concept of Mobile Agents to the hardware level introducing the concept of hardware mobility.
The activities are divided as follows:
ARCHITECTURE OF THE DISTRIBUTED SYSTEM AND INTERACTION MECHANISMS AMONG COMPONENTS (Unit of Napoli Federico II): definition of an infrastructure (in terms of hardware and software minimum requirements) able to handle search and access of mobile agents, to adequately configure the computing node (agent search and access problems); definition of performance analysis models to determine in advance the best reconfiguration schema.
HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE OF THE COMPUTING NODE AND DYNAMIC RECONFIGURATION (Unit of Politecnico di Torino): definition and design of architectural solutions for the computing node able to detect, during the normal operations, possible permanent faults in the node components and find efficient and effective reconfigurations to solve the problem.
TECHNIQUES TO DEVELOP AND TEST SOFTWARE AGENTS (Unit of Milano-Bicocca) definition of techniques to test and reconfigure computing nodes composed of both statically known and dynamically reconfigurable hardware and software components.