From:Hahn, Danny
Sent: Mon 12/3/2007 7:47 AM
To:'sfba@incose.org'
Subject: Monthly INCOSE SFBAC Meeting -- December 11, 2007 -- At Santa Clara University
Tuesday Evening Monthly Program -- December 11, 2007
5:30 PM Social Half-Hour and Snack.
6:00-7:00 Talk followed by questions.
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Place: Santa Clara University, in Room 326 of the Bannan School of Engineering Building.
Directions, including Transit information is at http://www.incose.org/sfbac/Directions-to-SCU.html
From the main campus entrance on El Camino Real in Santa Clara, CA, stop at the visitors entrance booth and ask for a "Visitors" parking permit.
Say you are here for a meeting and that you are an invited guest of the Dean of Engineering. Park in the parking garage in the visitor's parking spaces or in any other available "Visitors" parking space.
Go to Engineering Room 326. Walk to the large three-story building that runs parallel to the parking structure. This is the Bannan School of Engineering Building. Room 326 is on the third floor on the Southwest side of the building. The Bannan Quad and front entrance is on the side facing West. If you have any questions, you may contact Campus Security at 408-554-4441.
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Abstract:
There has recently been an active debate in the INCOSE Fellows community on several aspects of the topic of system architecture. Clearly, architecture is a topic of interest and concern within the INCOSE community, and across the larger community that includes systems engineers, system designers, and system implementers. This panel discussion will aim to share participants' insights and ideas about:
Panel Moderator: Dorothy McKinney
Panelists: Brent Welch, Mark Gerhardt (possibly two others to be announced)
Dorothy will start off with a framework provided by Jim Whalen for when conventional system architecting is sufficient, and when something more is needed, such as the Applied Systems Architecting Method developed by Mark Maier. (Jim Whalen teaches system architecture for the Center for Systems Management, and Mark Maier, who works for Aerospace Corporation, is the author of the text The Art of System Architecting.)
Brent will address the need for large systems to have a model-based management component so they can monitor their behavior and "take care of themselves" to a large degree. We will continue to build larger and larger systems that are composed of lots of moving parts. Partial failures are common, and much of the software in such a system is about handling failures. If you try do to all the error handling in an ad-hoc way, you quickly get into trouble. If the system has a model of itself, then it can monitor things to determine the current state, and also maintain a "desired state" and kick of processes to achieve the desired state. This needs to be continually evaluated because things can fail, or the desired state can change. We've built a system manager like this for our cluster-based, distributed file system, and Brent will give some examples of how things work in that context.
Mark will raise a concern about what needs to be captured during architecture development about the emerging architecture componentry that gets specified and then later implemented. The architecture process should involve continuous concern about three simultaneous aspects of components: partitioning, collaboration, and contention. In addition nonfunctional side effects produced by usage and execution of these components often have dominant effects on the acceptability of the resulting component.
Many traditional and simplified current approaches for architecture development describe an oversimplified top-down successive refinement, usually done according to functional coherency refinement rules. This almost always results in incomplete or incorrect collaboration, contention, and nonfunctional side effects. A more robust middle-out development approach that simultaneously considers and characterizes collaboration, contention, and nonfunctional properties in addition the traditional service oriented functionality is required to completely characterized and architectural component. Mark will give examples and suggested directions to improve the process.
Bio: Brent Welch
Brent Welch is Director of Software Architecture at Panasas. Panasas has developed a scalable, high-performance, object-based distributed file system that is used in a variety of HPC environments, including many of the Top500 super computers. He has worked at Xerox-PARC and Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Brent has experience building software systems from the device driver level up through network servers, user applications, and graphical user interfaces. While getting his PhD at UC Berkeley, he designed and built the Sprite distributed file system. Brent is the creator of the TclHttpd web server, the exmh email user interface, and the author of Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk. Brent participates in the NFSv4 working group, and is co-author of the pNFS internet drafts that specify parallel I/O extensions for NFSv4.
Bio: Mark Gerhardt
Mark Gerhardt is currently chief scientist at TPSI Inc. He has been involved for over 35 years in the conception, construction, and deployment of large and complex mission critical and high-performance software-based systems. Previous positions include software engineering laboratory deputy director at Loral Mission systems, chief scientist at ESL, Inc., and involvement in many radar, sonar, and EW products at Raytheon, Lockheed, Boeing, and TRW. He has been involved with the generation of the schedulability performance and timing (SPT) profile for UML as well as the current modeling and analysis of real-time embedded systems (MARTE) profile for UML being developed within the Object Management Group. He was a distinguished reviewer for the Ada95 programming language. He has also done extensive work involving Rate Monotonic Analysis and the use of schedulability tools during architecture development. He is also involved in the IEEE 1471 work for the recommended practice on how to capture architecture. Mr. Gerhardt holds a Master of Science in Engineering (Computer Science) from Princeton University.
Bio: Dorothy McKinney
Dorothy McKinney is the Chief Software Architect and a Senior Fellow at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company; she has worked over 25 years for Lockheed Martin and heritage companies. Dorothy also teaches a course on Requirements Engineering over the internet for Portland State University. Other industry experience included three years at ARGOSystems (a Boeing subsidiary), and nine years at SRI International (formerly called Stanford Research Institute). A graduate of Prescott College with a B.A. and double major in Systems Sciences and English, Dorothy also has a M.S. in Computer Engineering from Stanford University, and an M.B.A. from Pepperdine. Professional society membership includes INCOSE, AIAA and IEEE. Dorothy is an INCOSE Fellow and an AIAA Associate Fellow. She has been active in the International Council On System Engineering, since 1992, and is a past president and current Board of Directors member of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter. She was the Technical Chair of the INCOSE 2002 Symposium, as well as the recent 2007 Symposium, which was held in San Diego.
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Food Donation: FREE for members; $4 for non-members. For more information,
contact:
Dana Anderson, 408-742-2286, (dana.r.anderson@lmco.com)
or
Danny Hahn, 650-966-2107, (danny.hahn@incose.org) or
Dorothy McKinney, 408-742-8790, (dorothy.mckinney@lmco.com).
For information about this mailing list please visit http://www.incose.org/sfbac/mail.html
The mission of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), a non-profit professional society, is to "foster the definition, and practice of World Class Systems Engineering in industry, academia, and government."
The SF Bay Area Chapter presents thought-provoking monthly programs for its members and their guests. Learn about INCOSE at www.incose.org.