The ECho Event Delivery System

ECho is an event delivery middleware system developed at Georgia Tech. ECho is distinguished by efficient and flexible support for event typing and the ability to assign event handlers to specific threads for transparent support of both inter- and intra-process communication. ECho also introduces the concept of a "derived event channel." ECho uses dynamic code generation to implement derived event channels and exploit their ability to move user-level processing to remote locations. ECho is described in the following publications:

• The ECho Event Delivery System, Greg Eisenhauer, postscript, pdf Note: This is essentially a users guide for ECho, updated July 2002.
• IQ-Services: Resource-Aware Middleware for Heterogeneous Applications, Zhongtang Cai, Greg Eisenhauer, Christian Poellabauer, Karsten Schwan and Matthew Wolf, Proc. of the 13th Heterogenous Computing Workshop (HCW 2004), invited paper, April 2004, Santa Fe, NM.
  PostScript [1.1M] | PDF Format [260K]
• Service Morphing: Integrated System- and Application-Level Service Adaptation in Autonomic Systems, Christian Poellabauer, Karsten Schwan, Sandip Agarwala, Ada Gavrilovska, Greg Eisenhauer, Santosh Pande, Calton Pu, and Matthew Wolf, Proceedings of the 5th Annual International Workshop on Active Middleware Services (AMS 2003), Seattle, Washington, June 2003.
  Postscript [3.3M] | PDF Format [350K]
• Scalable Directory Services Using Proactivity,Fabián E. Bustamante, Greg Eisenhauer, Karsten Schwan and Patrick Widener, Proc. of Supercomputing 2002 (SC2002), Baltimore, MD, November 16-22, 2002.
  PostScript [220K] | PDF Format [129K]
• InfoFabric: Adaptive Services in Distributed Embedded Systems, Karsten Schwan, Christian Poellabauer, Greg Eisenhauer, Santosh Pande, Calton Pu, Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Large Scale Real-Time and Embedded Systems (in conjunction with RTSS 2002), Dec 2002.
• KECho - Event Communication for Distributed Kernel Services, Christian Poellabauer, Karsten Schwan, Greg Eisenhauer, Jiantao Kong, Trends in Network and Pervasive Computing, International Conference on Architecture of Computing Systems (ARCS'02), Springer Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2002, pp.83-100.
  PostScript [212K] | PDF Format [48K]
• Active Streams and the effects of stream specialization, Fabián E. Bustamante, Greg Eisenhauer, Karsten Schwan and Patrick Widener, Poster in Proc. of Tenth International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC-2001), San Francisco, California, August 7-9, 2001.
  Abstract | PostScript [119K] | PDF Format [34K] Poster (PowerPoint) [1053K]
• JECho - Interactive High Performance Computing with Java Event Channels, Dong Zhou, Karsten Schwan, Greg Eisenhauer, Yuan Chen, in the Proceedings of the 2001 International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2001), April 2001. [PS] [PDF]
Native Data Representation: An Efficient Wire Format for High Performance Computing, Greg Eisenhauer, Fabián E. Bustamante and Karsten Schwan. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Vol 13, No 12, December 2002.
Abstract | PostScript [332K] | PDF Format [418K]
• Event Services in High Performance Systems, Greg Eisenhauer, Fabián E. Bustamante and Karsten Schwan, Cluster Computing: The Journal of Networks, Software Tools, and Applications, Vol 4, Num 3, July 2001, pp 243-252.
  Abstract | PostScript [232K] | PDF Format [200K]
• Open Metadata Formats: Efficient XML-Based Communication for High Performance Computing, Patrick Widener, Greg Eisenhauer, and Karsten Schwan, Proceedings of High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC 10), San Francisco, California, August 7-9, 2001. PostScript [147K] | PDF Format [73K]
• Active Brokers and Their Runtime Deployment in the ECho/JECho Distributed Event Systems, Dong Zhou, Yuan Chen, Greg Eisenhauer and Karsten Schwan, Proceedings of the Third Annual International Workshop on Active Middleware Services (AMS 2001), August 2001.
  PostScript [208K] | PDF Format [60K]
• Open Metadata Formats: Efficient XML-Based Communication for Heterogeneous Distributed Systems, Patrick Widener, Karsten Schwan, and Greg Eisenhauer, Proceedings of the Poster Session of ICDCS-21, Phoenix, Arizona, April 16-19, 2001.
• Active Streams: An approach to adaptive distributed systems, Fabián E. Bustamante, Greg Eisenhauer, Patrick Widener, Karsten Schwan, and Calton Pu, Proc. 8th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, 2001.
  Abstract | PostScript [19K] | PDF Format [11K]
• A Middleware Toolkit for Client-Initiated Service Specialization, Greg Eisenhauer, Fabian Bustamente and Karsten Schwan, Proceedings of the PODC Middleware Symposium - July 18-20, 2000. postscript, PDF
• Event Services for High Performance Computing, Greg Eisenhauer, Fabian Bustamente and Karsten Schwan, Proceedings of High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC-2000). postscript, PDF
• JECho - Supporting Distributed High Performance Applications with Java Event Channels, Dong Zhou, Karsten Schwan, Greg Eisenhauer and Yuan Chen, Proceedings of Cluster2000, IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing.
• Efficient Wire Formats for High Performance Computing, Fabián E. Bustamante, Greg Eisenhauer, Karsten Schwan, and Patrick Widener, in Proc. of Supercomputing 2000 (SC 2000), Dallas, Texas, November 4-10, 2000.
  Abstract | PostScript [206K] | PDF Format [98K]
• Remote Application-level Processing through Derived Event Channels in ECho, Greg Eisenhauer, Unpublished. postscript, pdf
• ECho Event Delivery Middleware, Greg Eisenhauer, A two-page handout with a basic description of ECho. postscript, pdf

ECho Version 2 is now based on the Connection Manager (CM) library. CM is a DLL-based messaging middleware that is designed to help manage the complexity of systems with multiple communication links between heterogenous machines.  It provides an infrastructure to assist in building networks of entities communicating application-specific data. The previous, DataExchange-based version of ECho is no longer being maintained. No new program sets should be developed for it. Users of the DE-based ECho may with to refer to the porting guide in order to update their programs to the new version. Note that programs based on the DataExchange-based version of ECho will not interoperate with the CM-based version of ECho.

Getting ECho.

ECho source is available for academic research purposes. Users outside College of Computing, please Email for access. CoC users can download a source tarball directly. Alternatively, for binary installations we have :

• a RedHat 9 i386 RPM (version 2.2, release 21, Feb 17, 2006) [4.5Mb] (requires root privs to install)
• a RedHat Enterprise 4 i386 RPM (version 2.2, release 24, Jan 24, 2008) [2.9Mb] (requires root privs to install)
• a Linux source RPM (version 2.2, release 24, Jan 24, 2008) [5.0Mb]
• prebuilt RedHat Enterprise 4 binaries as a gzip'd tar file (version 2.2, Jan 18, 2006) [2.3Mb]
• prebuilt Solaris 8 binaries as a gzip'd tar file (version 2.2, Jan 18, 2006) [2.7Mb]

However, if you're going to be making changes, porting to a new platform or doing anything else that may require closer ties to our source trees, please consider a CVS checkout for relevant packages.

This page is maintained by  Greg Eisenhauer