Computer Engineering Commons^™

Adaptive Methods For Distributed Video Presentation, Crispin Cowan, Shanwei Cen, Jonathan Walpole, Carlton Pu

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper describes problems and solutions for delivering real-time, multi-media presentations across the Internet. A key characteristic of presentations of continuous media datatypes, such as digital video and audio, is their need for predictable real-time data delivery. For example, an NTSC quality video presentation requires video frames to be displayed every 1/30th of a second. Variations in this display rate can be observable as stalls or glitches in the video stream and reduce the quality of the presentation [6]. Delivering such presentations across the Internet is difficult because highly variable band- width and latency make it difficult to predict the …

Quality Of Service Specification For Multimedia Presentations, Richard Staehli, Jonathan Walpole, David Maier

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The bandwidth limitations of multimedia systems force tradeoffs between presentation data fidelity and real-time performance. For example, digital video is commonly encoded with lossy compression to reduce bandwidth and frames may be skipped during playback to maintain synchronization. These tradeoffs depend on device performance and physical data representations that are hidden by a database system. If a multimedia database is to support digital video and other continuous media data types, we argue that the database should provide a Quality of Service (QOS) interface to allow application control of presentation timing and information loss tradeoffs.

This paper proposes a data model …

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

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.

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.

Safe Stratified Datalog With Integer Order Programs, Peter Revesz

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Guaranteeing termination of programs on all valid inputs is important for database applications. Termination cannot be guaranteed in Stratified Datalog with integer (gap)-order programs on generalized databases because they express any Turing-computable function. This paper introduces a restriction of those programs that can express only computable queries. The restricted language has a high expressive power and a non-elementary data complexity.

Mpvm: A Migration Transparent Version Of Pvm, Jeremy Casas, Dan Clark, Ravi Konuru, Steve Otto, Robert Prouty, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is a widely-used software system that allows a heterogeneous set of parallel and serial UNIX-based computers to be programmed as a single message-passing parallel machine, In this paper, an extension to PVM to support dynamic process migration is presented. Support for migration is important in general-purpose workstation environments since it allows parallel computations to co-exist with other applications, using idle-cycles as they become available and off-loading from workstations when they are no longer free. A description and evaluation of the design and implementation of the prototype Migratable PVM system is presented together with some performance results.

Study Of The Subjet Structure Of Quark And Gluon Jets, D. Buskulic, D., M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Measurements of the subjet structure of quark and gluon jets in hadronic Z decays are presented. The analysis is based on one million hadronic events recorded by the Aleph detector. Roughly symmetric three-jet events are selected with a coarse jet-resolution cut-off, y1. Gluon jets are identified with a purity of 94.6% in those events where evidence of long-lived heavy-flavour hadrons in the other two jets is found. The jets are then analyzed using a smaller cut-off y0 (< y1) so that subjets are resolved. The properties of the jets (subjet multiplicities (Nq), (Ng) and rates Rng(q) for n = 1, 2, 3, 4) are determined and are found to be in good agreement with the expectations of perturbative QCD as long as the subjet resolution parameter y0 is sufficiently large to keep non-perturbative effects small. In particular, the ratio , which to leading order in QCD is given by the ratio of colour factors , is measured to be 1.96 ± 0.15 for y0 = 2 · 10−3, but falls to 1.29 ± 0.03 for y0 = 1.6 · 10−5.

A Single-Stroke Orientation-Orient Gesture System, Yike Hu

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

No abstract provided.

Transient Data Sharing Among Mobile Programs, Jerome Plun, Gruia-Catalin Roman

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Mobile computing represents a major point of departure from the traditional distributed computing paradigm. The potentially very large number of independent computing units, a decoupled computing style, frequent disconnections, continuous position changes, and the location-dependent nature of the behavior and communication patterns present designers with unprecedented challenges in the areas of modularity and dependability. This paper describes a modular approach to specifying and reasoning about of mobile computing. Its novelty rests with the notion of allowing transient (location-dependent) data sharing among programs which move in space. The notation is a direct extension of that used in UNITY and reasoning about …

An Efficient Signaling Structure For Atm Networks, Dakang Wu

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

As ATM becomes widely accepted as the communication standard for high speed networks, the signaling system structure and protocols that support ATM become more and more important. To support existing, future and unknown applications, the signalign system has to be very flexible and efficient. In this paper we define the signaling problem, present several possible signaling system structures, compare the advantages and disadvantages of these systems, and then we propose a new signaling system structure. The fundamental idea of the new signaling system is the logical separation of the signaling system structure from the underlying communication network, even though they …

Building Interactive Distributed Applications In C++ With The Programmers' Playground, Kenneth J. Goldman, T. Paul Mccartney, Ram Sethuraman, Bala Swaminathan And Todd Rogers

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

No abstract provided.

Efficient Demultiplexing Of Network Packets By Automatic Parsing, Mahesh Jayaram, Ron K. Cytron

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Packet filters are a mechanism for efficiently demultiplexing network packets to application endpoints. There is currently no general, formal specification method for packet filters that allows for easy or efficient composition of specifications. In this paper we present an automatic approach that achieves all of these goals. We approach packet filter specification as a language recognition problem: each filter is represented by a context-free grammar, whose language is the set of packets the filter should accept. Thus, packet filters can be formulated through a general, well defined specification; further, the grammar-based approach simplifies filter composition, which is essential where scalability …

Adaptive Resonance Associative Map, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This article introduces a neural architecture termed Adaptive Resonance Associative Map (ARAM) that extends unsupervised Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) systems for rapid, yet stable, heteroassociative learning. ARAM can be visualized as two overlapping ART networks sharing a single category field. Although ARAM is simpler in architecture than another class of supervised ART models known as ARTMAP, it produces classification performance equivalent to that of ARTMAP. As ARAM network structure and operations are symmetrical, associative recall can be performed in both directions. With maximal vigilance settings, ARAM encodes pattern pairs explicitly as cognitive chunks and thus guarantees perfect storage and recall …

Maintaining High Throughput During Overload In Atm Switches, Jonathan S. Turner

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This report analyzes two popular heuristics for ensuring packet integrity in ATM switching systems. In particular, we analyze the behavior of packet tail discarding, in order to understand how the packet level link efficiency is dependent on the rates of individual virtual circuits and the degre of the imposed overload. In addition, we study early packet discard and show that the queue capacity needed to achieve high efficiency under worst-case conditions grows with the number of virtual circuits and we determine the efficiency obtainable with more limited queue capacities. Using the insights from these analyses, extensions to early packet discard …

Real-Time Upcalls: A Mechanism To Provide Real-Time Processing Guarantees, Raman Gopalakrishna, Guru M. Parulkar

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Real-time upcalls (RTUs) are an operating systems mechanism that can be used by applications to efficiently schedule code segments (or handlers) that must execute periodically. While the mechanism was conceibed to support protocol processing with quality-of-service guarantees for networked multimedia applicatoins it is general enough to be applicable in other domains like real-time image processing. Until now real-time threads have been the only mechanism for implementing protocols in user space with QoS guarantees. The RTU mechanism avoids the implementation complexity of the thread based approach while retaining its ability to ensure real-time behavior. In addition, our design simplifies protocol code, …

Issues In Distributed Control For Atm Networks, Jonathan S. Turner

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network technology is expected to become a central part of the emerging global information infrastructure. ATM networks introduce a number of features that distinguish them from earlier technologies and introduce new issues in network control. This paper offers a framework for precisely defining and analyzing alternative approaches to the distributed control of ATM networks and explores some of the key design issues through a series of examples. It is hoped that it will provide a useful foundation for researchers in networking and distributed computing interested in exploring these issues further and developing more complete solutions.

Euphoria Reference Manual, T. Paul Mccartney, Kenneth J. Goldman

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

No abstract provided.

Can Declared Strategy Voting Be An Effective Instrument For Group Decision-Making?, Lorrie Faith Cranor

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

The goal of this research is to determine whether declared strategy voting can be an effective tool for group decision-making. Declared strategy voting is a novel group decision-making procedure in which preference is specified using voting strategies - first-order mathematical functions that specify a choice in terms of zero or more parameters. This research will focus on refining the declared strategy voting concept, developing an accessible implementation of declared strategy voting that can be used for mock elections, assessing the potential impacts of declared strategy voting, and evaluating the effectiveness of declared strategy voting for group decision-making. This proposal describes …

An Oo Encapsulation Of Lightweight Os Concurrency Mechanisms In The Ace Toolkit, Douglas C. Schmidt

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This paper describes the design of the ACE object-oriented thread encapsulation class library. The architecture of this class library is presented from an end-user and internal design perspective and several key design issues are discussed. Readers should gain an understanding of the overall design approach as well as the tradeoffs between various software quality factors such as performance, portability, and extensibility.

Error Control For Continuous Media And Multipoint Applications, Christos Papadopoulos, Guru Parulkar

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

High-bandwidth multimedia applications pose new challenges to error control. These include the support of error control for Continuous Media (CM) streams and the scalable support of error control in multipoint applications where the number of participants is large. Current error control mechanisms provide no support for the above applications. In this report we present new error control mechanisms that provide the required support. Continuous media applications have strict timing requirements which greatly affect recovery. To support continuous media applications we have designed and implemented a point-to-point error control mechanism which features the following: (1) selective repeat retransmission, (2) conditional retransmission, …

Hart's Critics On Defeasible Concepts And Ascriptivism, Ronald P. Loui

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Hart's "Ascription of Responsibility and Rights" is where we find perhaps the first clear pronouncement of defeasibility and the technical introduction of the term. The paper has been criticised, disavowed, and never quite fully redeemed. Its lurid history is now being used as an excuse for dismissing the importance of defeasibility. Quite to the contrary, Hart's introduction of defeasibility has uniformly been regarded as the most agreeable part of the paper. The critics' wish that defeasibility could be better expounded along the lines of a Wittgensteinian game-theoretic semantics has largely been fulfilled. Even the most contentious part of the paper, …

Synchronized Data Objects, Marin Bezic

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Synchronized Data Objects (SDOs) are presented as a method of encapsulating, in the datatype definition, synchronization protocols that are used to control information exchange. SDOs are presented in the context of I/O abstraction, a programming model that seeks to separate communication from computation in order to support dynamic end-user configuration of distrivuted applications. SDOs can be used to implement a variety of synchronization paradigms, including remote invalidation, demand-driven data streams, remote procedure call, and promises. An implementation of SDOs is described in the context of The Programmers' Playground, a distributed application development environment that supports the I/O abstraction programming model. …

Design Of A Tool For Rapid Prototyping Of Communication Protocols, Aniruddha Gokhale, Ron Cytron, George Varghese

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

We present a new tool for automatically generating prototypes of communication protocols on a wide variety of platforms. Our goal is to reduce design time, enhance portability, and accommodate optimizations automatically. Users of the tool are required to provide an abstract implementation of the protocol in C++ without worrying about the underlying operating system specific system calls. Instead, the user employs high-level interface functions provided by the tool to interact with the underlying operating system. Users also need not worry about complex packet formats that involve fields of various bit and byte lengths. Instead, they use simple C/C++ struct declarations …

Aras: Asynchronous Risc Architecture Simulator, Chia-Hsing Chien, Mark A. Franklin, Tienyo Pan, Prithvi Prabhu

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

In this paper, an asynchronous pipeline instruction simulator, ARAS is presented. With this simulator, one can design selected instruction pipelines and check their performance. Performance measurements of the pipeline configuration are obtained by simulating the execution of benchmark programs on the machine architectures developed. Depending on the simulation results obtained by using ARAS, the pipeline configuration can be altered to improve its performance. Thus, one can explore the design space of aynchronous pipeline architectures.

Pac Learing Of One-Dimensional Patterns, Paul W. Goldberg, Sally A. Goldman, Stephen D. Scott

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Developing the ability to recognize a landmark from a visual image of a robot's current location is a fundamental problem in robotics. We consider the problem of PAC-learning the concept class of geometric patterns where the target geometric pattern is a configuration of k points on the real line. Each instance is a configuration of n points on the real line, where it is labeled according to whether or not it visually resembles the target pattern. To capture the notion of visual resemblance we use the Hausdorff metric. Informally, two geometric patterns P and Q resemble each othe runder the …

Distributed Debugging With I/O Abstraction, Andrew S. Koransky

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This thesis presents a simple, yet powerful, set of mechanisms for testing and debugging distributed applications consisting of modules that communicate through well-defined data interfaces. The tools allow default or programmer-defined functions to be attached to various communication events so that particular data values at interesting points in the program are made available for testing and debugging. The debugging status of each component of the communication interface can be controlled separately so that various debugging information can be turned on and off during program execution. By attaching breakpoints to programmer-defined fucntions in a standard debugger, fine-grained examination of each module …

Formal Specification Of A Dynamically Configurable Distributed System, Ram Sethuraman, Kenneth J. Goldman

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

The Programmers' Playground is a programming environment that supports end-user construction of distributed multimedia applications. The system implements a new programming model that is based, in part, upon ideas from the formal I/O automaton model of Lynch and Tuttle. Important features of The Programmers' Playground are a separation of communication and computation and graphical support for dynamic reconfiguration. This paper provides a formal specification of the Playground programming model and runtime system in terms of the I/O automaton model on which it is based. Exploiting the compositionality properties of the I/O automaton model, the formal specification is describd as a …

Redesigning The Bsd Callout And Timer Facilities, Adam M. Costello, George Varghese

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

We describe a new implementation of the BSD callout and timer facilities. Current BSD kernels take time proportional to the number of outstanding timers to set or cancel timers. Our implementation takes constant time to start, stop, and maintain timers; this leads to a highly scalable design that can support thousands of outstanding timers without much overhead. Unlike the existing implementation, our routines are guaranteed to lock out interrupts only for a small, bounded amount of time. We also extend the setitimer() interface to allow a process to have multiple outstanding timers, thereby reducing the need for users to maintain …

User Interface Applications Of A Multi-Way Constraint Solver, T. Paul Mccartney

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Constraints are widely recognized as a useful tool for user interface constructino. Through constraints, relationships among user interface components can be defined declaratively, leaving the task of relationship management to a constraint solver. Multi-way constraint solvers supporting constraint hierarchies provide a means to specify preferential constraint relationships with a dynamically changing computation flow, making them especially well suited to interactive user interfaces. However, previous such constraint solvers lack the ability to enforce inequalities or to effectively handle cyclic constraint relationships. These deficiencies limit the problems that could be solved using a constraint-based approach. This paper presents a new algorithm called …