Re: what does your Ada + hardware look like ?

[brbarkstrom@gmail.com]

About a year ago, I assembled an Intel Atom Dual Core with 28 GB of
SSD.  My son helped me drop in Ubuntu Linux Desktop LTS 14.04.  Then, we
downloaded the GNAT GPL Ada (2014).  Very slow text response, but it looks
like it would work even then.  My son suggested using the Ubuntu Server
edition, which is completely command line driven.  In this case, I don't
think there's likely to be much difference between a desktop computer
and a bare board.  The reviews of the newer Atoms suggest that they will
be a good deal faster.  It would probably be straightforward to attach one
little box to each instrument.  I suspect if you needed to do repairs or
upgrade the software, you would have a pretty straightforward job.

One advantage of this approach (as with ARM or other, similar devices) is that
they can run in a fanless enclosure.  I also suspect that it wouldn't be
difficult to put together a Beowulf cluster using these units, which might
substantially increase the compute power available.  Given a full GNAT
GPL installation, it should even be possible to implement a PolyORB
AWS.  

If you want to do that, I'd recommend making sure you understand
concurrent programming in a distributed system.  Burns and Wellings (2007)
and McCormick, et al (2011) are probably sources to master.  A quite
valuable on-line course is available from
<http://se.inf.ethz.ch/courses/2015a_spring/ccc/>
It uses pseudocode and some java, but it's probably worth translating
that material to Ada and adding some ways of tracking performance.

Bruce B.