Performance Constraints of Distributed Control Loops on Linux Systems

The number of distributed applications that play important roles in industry, commerce, and daily life is steadily increasing. The execution behavior constraints that distributed applications must meet vary widely, but those of the important sub-class, the distributed control loops, are the focus of the work described in this report. Distributed control loops have two characteristics of particular interest: components of the application communicate with each other across machine boundaries, and the end-to end response time and other aspects of control loop behavior are subject to specified timing constraints. Distributed control loops have been implemented for decades, but generally using specialized computation platforms.