This paper presents the main issues facing next generation real-time distributed computing from a Computer Science perspective. In particular, the paper discusses scheduling, real-time kernels, communication and clock synchronization, architecture and fault tolerance, databases and artificial intelligence.
The rate monotonic theory and its generalizations have been adopted by national high technology projects such as the Space Station and has recently been supported by major open standards such as the IEEE Futurebus+ and POSIX. 4. In this paper, we focus on the architectural support necessary for scheduling activities using the generalized rate monotonic theory. We briefly review the theory and provide an application example. Finally we describe the architectural requirements for the use of the theory.