Toward Scaling Applications on Modern Avionics
Abstract
As avionic mission systems become more powerful, the environment in which applications are run starts to resemble that of the modern data center. Efficiently utilizing these resources is challenging to coordinate, but offers many opportunities to deploy onboard applications at scales that have not been feasible in the past. This project demonstrates an approach to transforming future mission applications to support such mission systems. We begin by outlining the design of a hypothetical track generation application (constructed by another intern, Abigail Delnoce), specifically discussing features that ensure the application can scale. Next, we describe the implementation of a local, lightweight Kubernetes environment (spread across two physical nodes) that can support scaling our application. From there, we discuss the deployment of the application into the environment we created. The applications scaling properties are characterized and enumerated, and these results are compared to expected outcomes produced analytically (based on the simulation being run). Finally, we explain some notable challenges with the approaches taken, and describe further application changes and architectural modifications that could increase the efficiency and transparency of mission applications that try to adopt such a pattern of design.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 2021
- Accession Number
- AD1148347
Entities
People
- Mitchell Bihn
Organizations
- Air Force Research Laboratory