Another development effort that I got to lead was a system test tool for the Tekelec signal transfer point (STP) which enables Tekelc personnel to stress the backbone of the STP in a controlled fashion. The STP is basically a large distributed multiprocessor blade system, where each blade in the STP has two processors. One processor is used for communication with other cards in the system, the second processor is used to run the application designed for that blade. One STP may contain blades with processors from the 286 all the way up to the latest high speed Xeon and/or IXP processors. With this recent influx of powerful processors it has become very important to verify that the communication backbone is capable of supporting the full gamut of Tekelec blades. Prior to my start at Tekelec there was no way of thoroughly testing the communication backbone so I decided to take the initiative to create such a test application.The test appication consists of the following components:
- UDP socket based server which runs on both Linux and VxWorks
- C++ dynamic link library (dll) which provides the Windows client side socket API
- MFC GUI application which links with the dll and enables users to preform directed tests
- Command line application which also links with the dll and enables users to write automated test cases with a simple single pass scripting language
This test tool was released for internal Tekelec useage, and shipped to customer sites around Q3 2007.
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