SANKHYA Middleware

SANKHYA Varadhi - Usage Scenarios

Intelligence is the product of the managed interaction of a diverse array of agents, rather than the product of any singular mechanism.

-- Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind

Varadhi is basically a powerful tool for building distributed applications. It provides various mechanisms like fault-tolerance, multi-threading, CORBA ® and Web Services. A software team using Varadhi will be able to complete any kind of distributed computing project much faster, sometimes as much as 90% faster when compared to a team which builds its own distributed computing infrastructure. Here are some real and some conceptual usage scenarios for Varadhi.

Download SANKHYA Varadhi 1.2 for Evaluation or Purchase

Web Services

Varadhi enables the development of web services clients and servers using the WS-1 profile (SOAP and WSDL). As Varadhi is available on a variety of platforms like Windows, Linux and Unix, web services developed using Varadhi can easily be ported to various operating systems.

Existing client server applications developed using CORBA can be ported easily to Web Services using Varadhi, utilizing the capabilities of Varadhi to automatically translate from CORBA IDL to WSDL and vice-versa.

SANKHYA Consulting can help you get started with your web services projects even before you assemble your own development team.

Grid Computing

In the power industry, there are suppliers of power and consumers of power. These are connected using a power-grid. The same node may some times act as a consumer and sometimes as a supplier depending on load. This enables the power industry to manage fluctuating demand and supply across a wide region.

Grid computing brings this concept to the computing industry. Grids connect a large number of computers to create a massive computing resource which can then be used by consumers of computing resources, either free of cost or by paying a fee !

You can make a grid out of the computers within your organization or computers connected together through Internet. While it is a complex task to build general purpose distributed grids, it is a lot easier to build special purpose grids that perform specific tasks.

A grid will necessarily contain many grid servers, grid clients, a grid registry, a grid broker and a grid meter. The broker will manage a large computing task by distributing it across one or more grid servers, possibly over a period of time, and return the results of computation back to the grid client when the task is completed. It will also have to detect and recover from node or network failures. The grid registry will make it possible for clients and servers to register with the grid. The grid meter allows for measuring amount of computing resource supplied by various suppliers and used by various clients.

Whether you would like to use CORBA or Web Services (or both), Varadhi will make your task of designing and building a grid a lot easier.

If you are working on an academic grid computing project, you may qualify for a free 1-year subscription developer license of SANKHYA Varadhi. Contact sales@sankhya.com or use this form.

Document Management

Documents are the fundamental means by which people exchange information both within an organization as well as between different organizations. Varadhi powers the DMS AppBundle a web based document management system which enables organizations to create a central repository of organizational documents.

Varadhi Secure is used by these systems to provide document level, category level and operation level security, thereby enabling organizations to securely share documents across multiple-sites.

The Varadhi module for Apache, enables the use of the DMS AppBundle from web browsers thereby ensuring that there is zero-maintenance on the client side.

Distributed Simulation

Varadhi powers distributed simulation tools like SANKHYA Debugger . If you are developing a distributed simulation system in areas like CPU simulation, system simulation, SoC (System-on-Chip) simulation hardware software co-design or RTL verification, the use of SANKHYA Varadhi will make your task significantly easy. In addition to completing the development faster, the use of CORBA IDL files for interface description will make it easier to publish and share standard interfaces to the simulator servers and clients - thereby eliminating the need for sharing C and C++ header files between software development teams !

Banking and Finance

Banking and Finance organizations often cater to customers distributed across large geographic regions often spanning continents. They interact with many organizations -- government, regulatory, customers and other banks and financial institutions as part of day to day business operations. Naturally, there is a continuous need to upgrade existing software and build new software to take care of new and changing requirements. SANKHYA Varadhi makes it easier for software development teams working in the banking and finance areas to take advantage of open standards like CORBA and Web Services when developing distributed applications.

SANKHYA Education helps banking and financial software companies by providing corporate training programs that impart essential distributed computing concepts and skills to your existing software development teams.

Building Automation

The SANKHYA Varadhi team has implemented a demonstration application (on Unix) that shows the use of Varadhi in a building control application. A large number of Varadhi Building Automation Processing Elements (VPE) can be connected in a grid or any other topology. The VPEs export appropriate Control, Activation and Sensor objects as CORBA IDL interfaces to the neighboring VPEs using SANKHYA Varadhi.

The VPEs can communicate with each other (either the immediate neighbors or other elements where necessary) to provide intelligent control of various facilities in the building. For example when a person walks into the building the VPE nearest to the person can detect and turn on the lamps in the room. In addition it can notify the neighboring VPEs about the detection of a person in the room. Those neighboring VPEs can then suitably react (in the demo they turn the simulated lamps to a dim state).

In a more complex scenario the VPEs can use more sophisticated algorithms to 'learn' the most likely route that will be taken by the person moving around the facility and use that knowledge to control the lamps, doors and elevators in the facility. Such a system when deployed in a large shopping mall can be used to predict the number of persons likely to visit a shop after a particular time.

This demonstration shows the ease with which CORBA can be used to build Intelligent Distributed Embedded Systems. SANKHYA Varadhi has been optimized for use in precisely such environments. By supporting just the most important features of CORBA for Embedded Systems Development, Varadhi provides Embedded Systems Developers an ideal middleware platform for creating intelligent Distributed Embedded Systems.

Point-of-Sale Appliances

One of the most challenging problems that faces point-of-sale system developers and integrators is the large variety of hardware and software components that have to be integrated to build a point-of-sale system. These range from input devices like numeric key pads, key boards, touch screens, smart card readers, speech recognition systems and bar-code readers; output devices like thermal or ink jet printers, electronic bill or confirmation generators; a variety of software to determine price and availability, update inventory, reorder items and compute a variety of taxes.

The range and variety of such components means that, either point-of-sale system is custom made for each individual business or a business has to buy an off-the-shelf system that may provide a lot more functionality (and therefore a lot more expensive) than what is required.

Modern sale transactions are not just limited to retail stores where the traditional point-of-sale would occur. A point-of-sale may now occur in a variety of environments where the nature of each transaction (not just each business) may actually be different. This means that a virtual point-of-sale system may have to be automatically created for each sale transaction. Imagine a sale transaction where the buyer enters a part-number over a WAP enabled phone, uses a smart card reader attached to his car to enter billing information and when the transaction is finished, an e-mail confirmation is sent to the buyer's e-mail address and a receipt is printed on the car's (auto-)mobile printer!

Varadhi provides the optimal set of tools for creating modern point-of-sale devices. By standardizing the architecture and interfaces (but not the actual implementation or technology) for the various components using CORBA IDL, advanced and cost-effective point-of-sale sale systems can be created using SANKHYA Varadhi. SANKHYA Varadhi XE is ideally suited to run in the embedded devices that often form part of any point-of-sale system and SANKHYA Varadhi SE can be used on the desktops and servers.

Here is an example that shows how Varadhi can save money for departmental stores: It is common for one to see departmental stores to use a computer, a printer a network connection and of course the bar-code readers at each check-out counter. A good cost cutting measure would be to use a virtual printer (A CORBA Object) at each counter, the virtual printer may print either to a locally connected printer object, a remote printer object (cutting down the number of printers) or just send an e-mail to the buyer's e-mail address. By representing the printer as a CORBA object, all of these options will be available to the departmental store, in fact the customer can chose a particular option (print or e-mail receipt) based on his preferences. The software that actually prints the receipt need not be modified when a new kind of virtual printer (Example: something that sends an SMS message to a cell phone ?) is added to the system as long as the new printer object conforms to the pre-determined CORBA IDL Printer Interface

Industrial Automation

  • Intelligent (distributed) Control
  • Distributed SCADA applications
  • Fault Tolerant Control

Telecommunications

CORBA is an important standard used for managing telecommunication equipment. With its small foot print, high performance, easy configurability and support for almost all the major real time operating systems, users of SANKHYA Varadhi can develop embedded clients and servers for management of deeply embedded telecommunication devices.

Intelligent Devices

With the ability to run on embedded devices, Varadhi can be embedded into a variety of intelligent devices, making it easier to develop applications to manage and use such devices. Here are a few examples where Varadhi can be used:

  • Robots
  • Remote Controlled Devices
  • Unmanned Vehicles

Distributed Games

Good Consumer Electronic, Distributed Game and Entertainment applications are hard to design and harder to implement. Now, focus on your idea to build your entertainment application and use Varadhi to take care of making your application distributed. If your application runs on Linux you can get started with Varadhi immediately, as Varadhi already works with many flavors of Linux and Embedded Linux including the CE Linux kernel. As there are no per-unit run-time royalties or licenses, Varadhi will not add to your per-unit cost.

Here are some applications which can take advantage of Varadhi --

  • Set top boxes
  • Media servers and clients
  • Distributed games
  • Digital video recorders
  • Gaming devices
  • Distributed mobile games

In all cases, SANKHYA Consulting can get you started by providing mentoring services. We can create initial UML ® use-cases and IDL files for your application and show how you can build clients and servers to complete your application faster and better.

To learn more about how Varadhi can help you reduce the cost of developing your distributed applications, increase the quality of your distributed systems and ensure that your applications can be changed as rapidly as today's business environment, contact sales@sankhya.com





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