An overview of Regis

Regis

The Distributed System

Regis is a programming environment for constructing distributed programs and systems which has been under development by members of the DSE section since late 1993. It stems from experience gained in the earlier Conic and REX projects. It is used primarily as a teaching system for undergraduates and an implementation testbed by postgraduate students.

Characteristics of the Regis approach are:

Structural aspects of distributed programs are orthogonal to algorithmic concerns and are expressed in a configuration language.
Programmers are not be constrained to use RPC for interaction between entities. It should be possible (and easy) for them to create their own communication classes to express the style of interaction most natural for the problem at hand.
Transport protocols are orthogonal to interaction styles. Programmers can use whatever transport layer is available and configure it to achieve the desired QoS.

Ports of the system exist for:

Sparcs and Sun-3s running SunOS (4.1) or Solaris (2.4).
HP 9000s running HP-UX (9.03).
PC compatibles running Linux or NetBSD.

The reference target is currently a Sparc running SunOS 4.1.3. Other target ports may drift out of date with respect to this one depending on usage.

Relevant publications

Jeff Magee, Naranker Dulay and Jeff Kramer. A Constructive Development Environment for Parallel and Distributed Programs. In IEE/IOP/BCS Distributed Systems Engineering, 1(5): 304-312, Sept 1994.

Stephen Crane and Kevin Twidle. Constructing Distributed Unix Utilities in Regis. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Configurable Distributed Systems, Pittsburgh, March 1994.

Stephen Crane, Jeff Magee and Nat Pryce. Design Patterns for Binding in Distributed Systems. Presented at the Workshop on Design Patterns for Concurrent, Parallel and Distributed Object-Oriented Systems at OOPSLA '95.

Nat Pryce and Stephen Crane. A Uniform Approach to Communication and Configuration in Distributed Systems. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Configurable Distributed Systems, Annapolis, May 1996.

Other interesting publications and slides.

Applications

Our active-badge location service was built using Regis. Use it to find out where we were last.

Thierry Cattel has used Regis to implement a Production Cell Simulator.

Source material

The ftp archive contains:

The latest version of the source code for the system.
Documentation for the system and the configuration language.
Source code for our active badge system.
Source code for a collection of `canonical' examples.

This material is provided as-is and is not for commercial use. At this time the Regis code is unsupported.

Here are answers to some Frequently-Asked Questions.

Related Resources

The system is currently being re-implemented in order to support research in current areas of interest. Here are some research directions.

Multimedia: the Management of Multi-Service Networks Project.
Multi-protocol binding establishment: Doctoral research which describes a formal model of binding and an ORB Implementation case study.
Architectural description: the Darwin configuration language.

This page is maintained by Stephen Crane (jsc@doc.ic.ac.uk). Last update: 20 June 1997.

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