Reliable heterogeneous applications

This paper explores the notion of computational resiliency to provide reliability in heterogeneous distributed applications. This notion provides both software fault-tolerance and the ability to tolerate information-warfare attacks. This technology seeks to strengthen a military mission, rather than to protect its network infrastructure using static defense measures such as network security, intrusion sensors, and firewalls. Even if a failure or attack is successful and never detected, it should be possible to continue information operations and achieve mission objectives. Computational resiliency involves the dynamic use of replicated software structures, guided by mission policy, to achieve reliable operation. However, it goes further to regenerate, automatically, replication in response to a failure or attack, allowing the level of system reliability to be restored and maintained. This paper examines a prototype concurrent programming technology to support computational resiliency in a heterogeneous distributed computing environment. The performance of the technology is explored through two example applications.