European air traffic flow management: porting a large application to GNU/linux

  • Authors:

  • Gaetan Allaert;Dirk Craeynest;Philippe Waroquiers

  • Affiliations:

  • Thales IS sa/nv, Brussels, Belgium;Aubay Belgium, Brussels, Belgium;Eurocontrol, Brussels, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2003 annual ACM SIGAda international conference on Ada: the engineering of correct and reliable software for real-time & distributed systems using ada and related technologies
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Computer hardware evolves very quickly. To benefit from cheaper and more powerful systems, big applications have to be ported to new environments. The Ada language has been designed for portability, making such migrations easier. However, today's applications often complement their main implementation language by various extra technologies: shell scripts, direct usage of OS primitives, different programming languages to access some libraries e.g. for graphical user interfaces, etc. These technologies are not always standardized or as portable as Ada so it is important to have indications about the portability of the various languages, libraries and tools.ETFMS, the Enhanced Tactical Flow Management System, is a large Eurocontrol/CFMU application written mainly in Ada. This paper reports the findings of an exploratory port of ETFMS from HP-UX PA-RISC to GNU/Linux Intel. The performance figures obtained on both platforms are compared and several conclusions about portability are given.