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posted by on Friday April 10 2015, @01:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the stay-on-my-lawn-for-a-long-long-time dept.

From the phys.org article:

As modern software systems continue inexorably to increase in complexity and capability, users have become accustomed to periodic cycles of updating and upgrading to avoid obsolescence—if at some cost in terms of frustration. In the case of the U.S. military, having access to well-functioning software systems and underlying content is critical to national security, but updates are no less problematic than among civilian users and often demand considerable time and expense. That is why today DARPA announced it will launch an ambitious four-year research project to investigate the fundamental computational and algorithmic requirements necessary for software systems and data to remain robust and functional in excess of 100 years.

The Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems, or BRASS, program seeks to realize foundational advances in the design and implementation of long-lived software systems that can dynamically adapt to changes in the resources they depend upon and environments in which they operate. Such advances will necessitate the development of new linguistic abstractions, formal methods, and resource-aware program analyses to discover and specify program transformations, as well as systems designed to monitor changes in the surrounding digital ecosystem. The program is expected to lead to significant improvements in software resilience, reliability and maintainability.

DARPA's press release and call for research proposals.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by tynin on Friday April 10 2015, @02:23AM

    by tynin (2013) on Friday April 10 2015, @02:23AM (#168600) Journal

    I'm pretty sure you don't give a toot about systemd, because that isn't what this is about. It is about truly adaptive software that can integrate in the face of changing hardware. One of the places these systems will make sense is in infrastructure that just needs to do 1 thing well, and for a long long time. These systems will not be as modern as the new tech of that day yet to come, but they don't need to be, they just need to work. Some things shouldn't need to have a staff of admin's constantly relearning the latest init systems of the day to keep the machine working after the next patch. Having a solid high tech infrastructure that can be repaired and perhaps scaled with the hardware tech of the day would be a boon across the board for the entire baseline of civilization.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2015, @07:49AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2015, @07:49AM (#168664)

    You mean like TCP/IP along with the associated alphabet soup of protocols? Packetheads figured that stuff out decades ago. It would be nice to apply that methodology to other things. The track record for networking robustness is amazing.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2015, @08:24AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2015, @08:24AM (#168671)

      Apparently TCP/IP software was not able to automatically adapt to a growing number of connected computers, so a manual update (IPv6) was needed.

  • (Score: 4, Funny) by Gaaark on Friday April 10 2015, @04:48PM

    by Gaaark (41) on Friday April 10 2015, @04:48PM (#168773) Journal

    Having a solid high tech infrastructure that can be repaired and perhaps scaled with the hardware tech of the day would be a boon across the board for the entire baseline of civilization.

    And call the software "Harry Seldon"

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