The PXISA hardware specification stipulates all feature requirements pertaining to the mechanical, electrical, and software architectures. The PXI Express specification is an implementation of the CompactPCI and CompactPCI Express specifications. Figure 2 shows how the mechanical and electrical aspects combine the CompactPCI and CompactPCI Express specifications with key PXI features to create the overall architecture. Subsequent sections in this paper break down these hierarchies to go into each section in additional detail and explain how they specifically apply to PXI.
The mechanical architecture specifies the physical compatibility between CompactPCI, CompactPCI Express, PXI, and PXI Express. For example, through the mechanical architecture, the system controller is defined to be in the leftmost slot of a PXI chassis to ensure it is at the left end of the PCI bus segment. It simplifies the integration and increases the degree of compatibility between chassis and controller options with this defined location.
The electrical architecture specifies the adherence to the PCI, PCI Express, CompactPCI, and CompactPCI Express specifications and power requirements. It also adds specific timing and synchronization features that make the PXI platform unique and suitable for high-performance test and measurement.
The PXI software specification defines the software architecture, a key element of the PXI platform. Because PXI is based on a software-defined instrumentation paradigm, PXI does not natively include direct user accessible features, such as a display screen, knobs, and push buttons, on the hardware. All the user accessible features are in software. The software frameworks define PXI system software requirements for both system controller modules and PXI peripheral modules. System controller modules and PXI peripheral modules have to meet certain requirements for OS and tool support to be considered compliant with a given PXI software framework.
In the Software Design and Architecture Specialization, you will learn how to apply design principles, patterns, and architectures to create reusable and flexible software applications and systems. You will learn how to express and document the design and architecture of a software system using a visual notation.
Based on an understanding of architectural styles, you will review architectures for web applications, then explore the basics of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) in two approaches: Web Services (WS*) and Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture.
You will be able to create better software applications and systems that are reusable, flexible, and maintainable, because your software will follow established design principles, patterns, and architectures. You will also be able to communicate to others your software designs and architectures through industry standard visual notations.
This advanced real-time operating system (RTOS) is designed specifically for deeply embedded applications. Among the multiple benefits it provides are real-time multithreading, inter-thread communication and synchronization, and memory management. Azure RTOS ThreadX has many advanced features, including picokernel architecture, preemption threshold, event chaining, and a rich set of system services.
Azure RTOS support plans are available for purchase. Microsoft ended sales and support of legacy Express Logic products in May 2020, however, support on existing paid contracts will be available through your existing channels (RTOS.com and sup...@expresslogic.com).
In a multiprocessing architecture with PCI Express, the SISCI API enables PCI Express based applications to use distributed resources like CPUs, I/O, and memory. The resulting application features reduced system latency and increased data throughput. The Dolphin SISCI Developers kit (Software Infrastructure Shared-Memory Cluster Interconnect) consists of driver and API software, tools, documentation and source needed to develop your own embedded application utilizing the low latency and high performance of a Dolphin PCI Express Network. The development kit provides a C system call interface to ease customer integration to the PCI Express Network. SISCI enables customer application to easily bypass the limitations of traditional network solutions, avoiding time consuming operating system calls, and network protocol software overhead. The SISCI software supports clusters of hundreds of nodes.
Throughout our lives, we use diagrams to break down concepts to learn and communicate them to others. We diagram sentences, we learn about the body through diagrams, we create diagrams to illustrate the steps of a process or a game. These visual aids augment spoken and written instruction to help cement ideas in our minds. They are particularly useful in the world of IT architecture.
But when communication tools come to mind, an organization often jumps first to the trusty slide deck. Slide presentations can help convey the overall goal for evolving architectures one project at a time, all while managing the key stakeholders through the deck's glossy storytelling. But slides meet their limits when it comes to mapping the many logical structures that make up cloud infrastructure and its many network topologies, security zones, CI/CD pipelines, and service dependencies.
Detailed mappings like these are not just nice to have. It is a necessary to provide a broader context for understanding dependencies across complex systems and to help actualize a vision for evolving architectures. Diagrams that spare no detail can answer important questions about compatibility, interoperability, and other key "-ilities" that architects are trusted to think through.
What would it look like to use Diagrams.net, but with the logical and conceptual structure of cloud-native infrastructure architecture built-in? That's the question the Portfolio Architecture Center aims to answer. This collection of curated iconography offers pre-defined "stacks" for concepts like CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, name services, containerized applications, microservices, and much more.
While widely used for mind mapping and other non-technical architecture designs, Lucidchart has a number of technology-focused architecture diagram options available in its library. A quick search will find everything from database diagramming using UML notation to Kubernetes deployments like the one above with a pre-defined template using GCP cloud architecture.
Gliffy is another modern online solution for architecture diagrams that cater to software engineers. It has similar icons to choose from when compared to Lucidcharts or Diagrams.net, but I was particularly appreciative of its sleek two-dimensional images. It may have one of the more complete libraries for cloud architects with icons for container orchestration systems and specific icons for Azure, GCP, and AWS architecture diagrams to map out your entire hybrid cloud architecture.
Many Mac users would think me remiss if I didn't mention OmniGraffle. It provides an architecture diagramming software that looks and feels native to the operating systems and has taken design seriously since its release in 2001. Adoption may be limited, as it is a macOS-only purchase, but it is an architectural diagramming software well-loved by many.
No matter what you use for a tool, the Kubernetes project provides an unofficial set of icons to create diagrams of Kubernetes architectures like this example example. The icons are available in the Kubernetes community repository. Download them and use them everywhere Kubernetes architecture is designed.
Whether you are an architect of clouds, storage, or applications, images are the way by which you share your ideas and vision. These architectural diagrams of complex systems reflect multiple views of the complex reality of IT infrastructure. All of the tools listed here will give you a great way to start designing images that tell the story of system architecture.
The opinions expressed on this website are those of each author, not of the author's employer or of Red Hat. The content published on this site are community contributions and are for informational purpose only AND ARE NOT, AND ARE NOT INTENDED TO BE, RED HAT DOCUMENTATION, SUPPORT, OR ADVICE.
If you have a non-subscription or older version of Visio, there are no Azure diagram (or Cloud and Enterprise) templates available. However, you can download Azure architecture icons, which enables you to create your own Azure diagrams with symbols and icons to represent your cloud system.
Ask somebody in the building industry to visually communicate the architecture of a building and you'll be presented with site plans, floor plans, elevation views, cross-section views and detail drawings. In contrast, ask a software developer to communicate the software architecture of a software system using diagrams and you'll likely get a confused mess of boxes and lines ... inconsistent notation (colour coding, shapes, line styles, etc), ambiguous naming, unlabelled relationships, generic terminology, missing technology choices, mixed abstractions, etc.
As an industry, we do have the Unified Modeling Language (UML), ArchiMate and SysML, but asking whether these provide an effective way to communicate software architecture is often irrelevant because many teams have already thrown them out in favour of much simpler "boxes and lines" diagrams. Abandoning these modelling languages is one thing but, perhaps in the race for agility, many software development teams have lost the ability to communicate visually.
The C4 model was created as a way to help software development teams describe and communicate software architecture, both during up-front design sessions and when retrospectively documenting an existing codebase. It's a way to create maps of your code, at various levels of detail, in the same way you would use something like Google Maps to zoom in and out of an area you are interested in.
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