Bulldozer00's Blog

The model below shows “our stack”. It’s a layered representation of the real-time, distributed software system that two peers and I are building for our next product line. Of course, I’ve intentionally abstracted away a boatload of details so as not to give away the keys to the store.

The code that we’ve written so far (the stuff in the funky green layers) is up to 50K SLOC of C++ code and we guesstimate that the system will stabilize at around 250K SLOC. In addition to this computationally intensive back end, our system also includes a Java/PHP/HTML display front end, but I haven’t been involved in that area of development. We’ve been continuously refactoring our “App Support Libs” layer as we’ve found turds in it via testing the multi-threaded, domain-specific app components that use them.

The figure below illustrates the flexibility and scalability of our architecture. From our growing pool of application layer components, a large set of product instantiations can be created and deployed on multiple  hardware configurations. In the ideal case, to minimize end-to-end latency, all of the functionality would be allocated to a single processor node like the top instantiation in the figure. However, at customer sites where processing loads can exceed the computing capacity of a single node, voila, a multi-node configuration can be seamlessly instantiated without any source code changes – just XML file configuration parameter changes. In addition, as the bottom instantiation shows, a fault tolerant, auto-failover, dual channel version of the system can be deployed for high availability, safety-critical applications.

Are you working on something as fun as this?