Systems Support for Next Generation Streaming Applications

18.02.2002

Foredragsholdere
Jonathan Walpole

Abstract:
Recent years have witnessed a revolution in the way people use computers. In today's Internet-dominated computing environment, information exchange has replaced computation as the primary activity of most computers. This revolution began with the use of the world wide web for accessing relatively static information. It has continued with the emergence of "streaming applications," such as video- and music-on-demand, IP telephony, Internet radio, IP video conferencing and remote surveillance systems. The advent of the "ubiquitous computing" age, with widespread use of interconnected, embedded and sensor-based systems, will only accelerate the development of new streaming applications in the future.

The essence of streaming applications is creation and management of information flows via producer-consumer interactions among potentially distributed components. The sources and sinks of these flows typically involve interactions with the real-world, imposing hard timing and resource management constraints. Although streaming applications are becoming common, existing programming models, operating system primitives and network protocols are not well-suited to support them. For example, system building primitives, such RPC, typicially hide communication and quality of service (QoS) issues, making it difficult for programmers to control them directly. This talk will describe ongoing research at OGI/OHSU in operating systems, networking and middleware support for next-generation streaming applications. It will describe a new programming model based on the "Infopipes" abstraction, and will discuss various aspects of operating system and network protocol support for Infopipes. Finally, it will cover several streaming applications that are under construction.


Biography:
Jonathan Walpole is a Full Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department and Director of the Systems Software Laboratory at the OGI School of Science and Engineering at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in Portland, Oregon, USA. His research focuses on adaptive systems software and its application in distributed, mobile, and multimedia computing environments. He has pioneered research in adaptive resource management and the integration of application and system-level quality of service management. He has also done leading edge research on dynamic specialization for enhanced performance, survivability and evolvability of large software systems. His research on distributed multimedia systems began in 1988, and in the early 1990s he lead the development of one of the first QoS-adaptive Internet streaming video players. He has published over 100 research papers and has served as a program committee member and reviewer for numerous International scientific conferences and journals. He holds B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Lancaster University, UK (1984 and 1987) and was awarded an Honorary Post Doctoral Fellowship by the UK Science and Engineering Research Council in 1988.



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