  Real-time control systems often require dedicated hardware and software,
including real-time operating systems, while many systems are available for
off-line computing, mainly based on standard system units (PCs), standard
network connections (Ethernet), standard operating systems (Linux) and software
independent from the particular architecture of the single unit. In order to
try to get the advantages of both the technologies, we built an hybrid control
system prototype using network based parallel computing architecture within
real-time control system. In this paper we describe the architecture of the
implemented system, the preliminary tests we performed for its characterization
and the architecture of the control system we used for the real-time control
tests.
