Development of a Prototype Distributed System Based on the Communication Systems Architecture (CSA)

Abstract

Within the office environment there is a trend towards multi-vendor systems with computing power distributed throughout. By its nature, the information and input/output resources are distributed on different nodes and accessed by many users from a variety of terminals. It is this complex scenario which motivated the project to investigate how such systems can be constructed and managed in a consistent manner. The project was convinced that major benefits could be realised if a consistent platform could be provided to application system irrespective of whether the underlying resources were single system/single vendor or distributed over multi-vendor systems. Our approach was to define an architecture (Communication Systems Architecture) that incorporated a number of strategic interfaces, observing standards where appropriate. An object oriented philosophy was adopted. From this architecture, the project constructed a number of platforms (Local CSA Machines) based on single end systems and moved on to implement a prototype platform based on a number of computing nodes linked by both local and wide-area networks (CSA Domain Machine). This paper outlines the architecture, describes the implementation of a Local CSA System, the design of the CSA Domain Machine and concludes by considering the relevance of the architecture to other environments and in which areas standards may be influenced.