A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and large-scale transaction processing. A mainframe computer is large but not as large as a supercomputer and has more processing power than some other classes of computers, such as minicomputers, servers, workstations, and personal computers. Most large-scale computer-system architectures were established in the 1960s, but they continue to evolve. Mainframe computers are often used as servers.
A web service (WS) is either:
In software engineering, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that focuses on discrete services instead of a monolithic design. SOA is a good choice for system integration. By consequence, it is also applied in the field of software design where services are provided to the other components by application components, through a communication protocol over a network. A service is a discrete unit of functionality that can be accessed remotely and acted upon and updated independently, such as retrieving a credit card statement online. SOA is also intended to be independent of vendors, products and technologies.
An enterprise service bus (ESB) implements a communication system between mutually interacting software applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). It represents a software architecture for distributed computing, and is a special variant of the more general client-server model, wherein any application may behave as server or client. ESB promotes agility and flexibility with regard to high-level protocol communication between applications. Its primary use is in enterprise application integration (EAI) of heterogeneous and complex service landscapes.
A blackboard system is an artificial intelligence approach based on the blackboard architectural model, where a common knowledge base, the "blackboard", is iteratively updated by a diverse group of specialist knowledge sources, starting with a problem specification and ending with a solution. Each knowledge source updates the blackboard with a partial solution when its internal constraints match the blackboard state. In this way, the specialists work together to solve the problem. The blackboard model was originally designed as a way to handle complex, ill-defined problems, where the solution is the sum of its parts.
Cougaar is a Java agent architecture.
A network on a chip or network-on-chip is a network-based communications subsystem on an integrated circuit ("microchip"), most typically between modules in a system on a chip (SoC). The modules on the IC are typically semiconductor IP cores schematizing various functions of the computer system, and are designed to be modular in the sense of network science. The network on chip is a router-based packet switching network between SoC modules.
Edge computing is a distributed computing model that brings computation and data storage closer to the sources of data. More broadly, it refers to any design that pushes computation physically closer to a user, so as to reduce the latency compared to when an application runs on a centralized data centre.
System integration is defined in engineering as the process of bringing together the component sub-systems into one system and ensuring that the subsystems function together as a system, and in information technology as the process of linking together different computing systems and software applications physically or functionally, to act as a coordinated whole.
Real-time Control System (RCS) is a reference model architecture, suitable for many software-intensive, real-time computing control problem domains. It defines the types of functions needed in a real-time intelligent control system, and how these functions relate to each other.
T-Kernel is an open source real-time operating system (RTOS) designed for 32-bit microcontrollers. It is standardized by the T-Engine Forum, which distributes it under a T-License agreement. There is also a corresponding Micro T-Kernel (μT-Kernel) implementation designed for embedded systems with 16-bit or 8-bit microcontrollers.
Middleware is a type of computer software program that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue".
Internetware is a term coined to describe the emerging software paradigm for the Internet computing environment. It also refers to the software exhibiting the desired properties to meet the requirements of the Internet environment.
In software engineering, a microservice architecture is an architectural pattern that arranges an application as a collection of loosely coupled, fine-grained services, communicating through lightweight protocols. A microservice-based architecture enables teams to develop and deploy their services independently, reduce code interdependency and increase readability and modularity within a codebase. This is achieved by reducing several dependencies in the codebase, allowing developers to evolve their services with limited restrictions, and reducing additional complexity. Consequently, organizations can develop software with rapid growth and scalability, as well as implement off-the-shelf services more easily. These benefits come with the cost of needing to maintain a decoupled structure within the codebase, which means its initial implementation is more complex than that of a monolithic codebase. Interfaces need to be designed carefully and treated as APIs.
Robot as a service or robotics as a service (RaaS) is a cloud computing unit that facilitates the seamless integration of robot and embedded devices into Web and cloud computing environment. In terms of service-oriented architecture (SOA), a RaaS unit includes services for performing functionality, a service directory for discovery and publishing, and service clients for user's direct access. The current RaaS implementation facilitates SOAP and RESTful communications between RaaS units and the other cloud computing units. Hardware support and standards are available to support RaaS implementation. Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) defines implementation constraints to enable secure Web Service messaging, discovery, description, and eventing on resource-constrained devices between Web services and devices.
Approximate computing is an emerging paradigm for energy-efficient and/or high-performance design. It includes a plethora of computation techniques that return a possibly inaccurate result rather than a guaranteed accurate result, and that can be used for applications where an approximate result is sufficient for its purpose. One example of such situation is for a search engine where no exact answer may exist for a certain search query and hence, many answers may be acceptable. Similarly, occasional dropping of some frames in a video application can go undetected due to perceptual limitations of humans. Approximate computing is based on the observation that in many scenarios, although performing exact computation requires large amount of resources, allowing bounded approximation can provide disproportionate gains in performance and energy, while still achieving acceptable result accuracy. For example, in k-means clustering algorithm, allowing only 5% loss in classification accuracy can provide 50 times energy saving compared to the fully accurate classification.
ASU VIPLE is a Visual IoT/Robotics Programming Language Environment developed at Arizona State University.
Executable choreography represents a decentralized form of service composition, involving the cooperation of several individual entities. It is an improved form of service choreography. Executable choreographies can be intuitively seen as arbitrary complex workflows that get executed in systems belonging to multiple organisations or authorities.
