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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Customizable Operating Systems, Jonathan Walpole, Crispin Cowan, Andrew P. Black, Jon Inouye, Calton Pu, Shanwei Cen Nov 1995

Customizable Operating Systems, Jonathan Walpole, Crispin Cowan, Andrew P. Black, Jon Inouye, Calton Pu, Shanwei Cen

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

A customizable operating system is one that can adapt to improve its functionality or performance. The need for customizable and application-specific operating systems has been recognized for many years, but they have yet to appear in the commercial market. This paper explores the notion of operating system customizability and examines the limits of existing approaches. The paper begins by surveying system structuring approaches for the safe and efficient execution of customizable operating systems. Then it discusses the burden that existing approaches impose on application software, and explores techniques for reducing this burden. Finally, support for customizability in the Synthetix project …


Device And Physical Data Independence For Multimedia Presentations, Richard Staehli, Jonathan Walpole, David Maier Nov 1995

Device And Physical Data Independence For Multimedia Presentations, Richard Staehli, Jonathan Walpole, David Maier

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Multimedia computing promises access to any type of visual or aural medium on the desktop. But in this networked future, will every type of media be accessible from every terminal device? Current multimedia standards do not allow content that is authored for high-bandwidth workstations to scale down for low-bandwidth applications. The problem is that application requests are commonly interpreted as requests for the highest possible quality and resource overloads are handled by ad hoc methods. We can begin to solve this problem by specifying Quality of Service (QOS) requirements based on functionality rather than on content encoding and device capabilities.


Scheduling Of Parallel Jobs On Dynamic, Heterogenous Networks, Dan Clark, Jeremy Casas, Steve Otto, Robert Prouty, Jonathan Walpole Jan 1995

Scheduling Of Parallel Jobs On Dynamic, Heterogenous Networks, Dan Clark, Jeremy Casas, Steve Otto, Robert Prouty, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

In using a shared network of workstations for parallel processing, it is not only important to consider heterogeneity and differences in processing power between the workstations but also the dynamics of the system as a whole. In such a computing environment where the use of resources vary as other applications consume and release resources, intelligent scheduling of the parallel jobs onto the available resources is essential to maximize resource utilization. Despite this realization, however, there are few systems available that provide an infrastructure for the easy development and testing of these intelligent schedulers. In this paper, an infrastructure is presented …