Volume 10, Number 1 • January/February 2002 • Small Business/SBIR

DataTurbine Offers Improved Information

When lives and money are at stake, people have precious little time to sit and wait for computers to add value to the decisions that need to be made. But the ever-improving capabilities of computers, networks and the information-processing systems that they run make it possible to envision decision support systems that effectively improve the situational awareness and accelerate decision-making processes of groups and individuals. Eventually, independently focused applications get integrated and fused while time constraints and remote participants drive us toward decision support environments that are distributed and collaborative with high-performance or real-time characteristics.

It is for this type of environment that NASA has developed and commercialized the Ring Buffered Network Bus, or RBNB DataTurbine™. This Java middleware solution is a cost-effective network cache for high-performance hierarchical peer-to-peer computing and interactive application integration problems. An extension of publish-subscribe technology, it is particularly well-suited to network-based data acquisition and processing, requiring time-based access and correlation across diverse and geographically distributed nodes. Its role as an intermediary enables users to effortlessly and independently scroll back and forth through time on distributed data that may be continuously updated.

For the medical industry, RBNB is a useful tool for systems integrators and application developers. Application examples include adapting live telemedicine environments to enable video-on-demand or other sensor-history-on-demand capabilities, implementing temporary source-side measurement storage services for later transmission across intermittent links, and building new integration, fusion and data management capabilities into Web-based emergency operations infrastructure. Q

For more information, contact Matthew Miller, manager, Scientific Data Products, Creare, Inc., mjm@creare.com http://rbnbcreare.com. Please mention you read about it in Innovation.

NASA Official: Jonathan Root • Web Design: Printing & Design Office, NASA Headquarters • Credits