Cactus is an implementation framework that allows fine-grain customization of Quality of Service (QoS) attributes such as fault tolerance, timeliness and security for software running in networked systems. With Cactus, a service is realized as a composite protocol that is constructed from smaller micro-protocol objects that provide fine-grain task execution and network communication guarantees. This talk gives an overview of the Cactus approach, prototype implementations, and the collection of example communication-oriented services constructed using these prototypes. I will also describe recent work on supporting coordinated adaptation in networked systems using Cactus.

Much of this work done while the speaker was on the faculty of the University of Arizona. Cactus web site: http://www.cs.arizona.edu/cactus/.