Cesium: Testing Hard Real-time and Dependability Properties of Distributed Protocols

Cesium is an object-oriented environment for testing that implementations of real-time, fault-tolerant protocols satisfy the safety and timeliness properties prescribed by their specifications. Protocol implementations are tested under configurable workloads and failure scenarios. A centralized simulator executes all tasks in a single address space while providing the appearance of truly distributed execution. Experiments can be exactly reproduced any number of times; Cesium provides an unprecedented degree of monitoring and control over them. It is not necessary to instrument (or even to have access to) the source code of the protocols under test. The observed behaviors correspond exactly to executions in the real system being simulated, as Cesium does not change the time of occurrence of any event. Besides from providing a testing and performance evaluation environment superior to real distributed systems, Cesium can test properties of existing protocols that can not be tested in any distributed environment.

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