DECALS: distributed experiment control and logging system
Alex Hubbard, C. Murray Woodside, Cheryl Schramm · 1995
In developing distributed applications and services there is a need to be able to set up and run tests on a set of processes. The experiment might be to obtain performance data, to test the processes' behaviour, or to evaluate an application management strategy. Common requirements are ffl to load and run special versions of at least some of the software, often on multiple nodes of a network, ffl to initialize the software in a wellcontrolled way, so the tests may be repeatable, ffl to monitor execution and collect results for post-execution or real-time analysis. DECALS 1 is a controlling framework to support the testing of distributed applications consisting of many processes on a network. There may be any number of experiments; in each experiment a set of processes is loaded on specified workstations, and each process is initialized with data for the particular experiment. The configuration of the experiment, and the data state of the processes, can be controlled down to any l...