Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Transportable Information Agents, Daniela Rus, Robert Gray, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Transportable agents are autonomous programs. They can move through a heterogeneous network of computers under their own control, migrating from host to host. They can sense the state of the network, monitor software conditions, and interact with other agents or resources. The network-sensing tools allow our agents to adapt to the network configuration and to navigate under the control of reactive plans. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of the navigation system that gives our agents autonomy. We also discuss the intelligent and adaptive behavior of autonomous agents in distributed information-gathering tasks.

Transportable Agents Support Worldwide Applications, David Kotz, Robert Gray, Daniela Rus

Dartmouth Scholarship

Worldwide applications exist in an environment that is inherently distributed, dynamic, heterogeneous, insecure, unreliable, and unpredictable. In particular, the latency and bandwidth of network connections varies tremendously from place to place and time to time, particularly when considering wireless networks, mobile devices, and satellite connections. Applications in this environment must be able to adapt to different and changing conditions. We believe that transportable autonomous agents provide an excellent mechanism for the construction of such applications. We describe our prototype transportable-agent system and several applications.

Worldwide applications exist in an environment that is inherently distributed, dynamic, heterogeneous, insecure, unreliable, and unpredictable. …

Koala: An Object-Agent Design System, Kym J. Pohl, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

This paper describes KOALA, a design system with primary focus on the predesign stage of architectural design. KOALA combines object-agent technology with high level representation to form a partnership between the human designer and the computer-based design environment. A diverse taxonomy of agents including Domain agents. Space agents, and Monitor agents work in a collaborative fashion to provide the human designer with expert evaluation and assistance in developing a design solution. Spaces, in their roles as agents attempt to formulate various design solutions based on individual perspectives through negotiation with other agents. The result is a highly interactive design environment …

Autonomous And Adaptive Agents That Gather Information, Daniela Rus, Robert Gray, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

We have designed and implemented autonomous software agents. Autonomous software agents navigate independently through a heterogeneous network of computers. They can sense the state of the network, monitor software conditions, and interact with other agents. The network-sensing tools allow our agents to adapt to the network configuration and to navigate under the control of reactive plans. In this paper we illustrate the intelligent and adaptive behavior of autonomous agents in distributed information-gathering tasks.

The Expected Lifetime Of Single-Address-Space Operating Systems, David Kotz, Preston Crow

Dartmouth Scholarship

Trends toward shared-memory programming paradigms, large (64-bit) address spaces, and memory-mapped files have led some to propose the use of a single virtual-address space, shared by all processes and processors. To simplify address-space management, some have claimed that a 64-bit address space is sufficiently large that there is no need to ever re-use addresses. Unfortunately, there has been no data to either support or refute these claims, or to aid in the design of appropriate address-space management policies. In this paper, we present the results of extensive kernel-level tracing of the workstations on our campus, and discuss the implications for …

Transportable Agents, Keith D. Kotay, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

As network information resources grow in size, it is often most efficient to process queries and updates at the site where the data is located. This processing can be accomplished by using a traditional client-server network interface, which constrains the client to the set of queries supported by the server, or requires the server to send all data to the client for processing. The former is inflexible; the latter is inefficient. Transportable agents, which support the movement of the client computation to the location of the remote resource, have the potential to be more flexible and more efficient. Transportable agents …

Devious: A Distributed Environment For Vision Tasks, Phillip R. Romig Iii, Ashok K. Samal

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

We present a system for the integration of computer vision tasks in a distributed environment. This system, called DeViouS, is based on the client/server model and runs in a heterogeneous environment of Unix workstations. It takes advantage of the free cycles in modern workstation environments to distribute and speed up the execution of vision tasks.

Two primary goals of DeViouS are to provide a practical distributed system and a research environment for vision computing. DeViouS is based on a modular design that allows experimentation in various aspects of algorithm design, scheduling and network programming. It can make use of any …

The Expected Lifetime Of “Single-Address-Space” Operating Systems, David Kotz, Preston Crow

Dartmouth Scholarship

Trends toward shared-memory programming paradigms, large (64-bit) address spaces, and memory-mapped files have led some to propose the use of a single virtual-address space, shared by all processes and processors. Typical proposals require the single address space to contain all process-private data, shared data, and stored files. To simplify management of an address space where stale pointers make it difficult to re-use addresses, some have claimed that a 64-bit address space is sufficiently large that there is no need to ever re-use addresses. Unfortunately, there has been no data to either support or refute these claims, or to aid in …

A Communication System For High-Performance Distributed Computing, Salim Hariri, Jongbaek Park, Manish Parashar, Geoffrey C. Fox

Northeast Parallel Architecture Center

With the current advances in computer and networking technology coupled with the availability of software tools for parallel and distributed computing, there has been increased interests in high-performance distributed computing (HPDC). We envision that HPDC environments with supercomputing capabilities will be available in the near future. However, a number of issues have to be resolved before future network-based applications can exploit fully the potential of HPDC environment. In this paper, we present an architecture of a high-speed local area network and a communication system that provides HPDC applications with high bandwidth and low latency. We also characterize the message-passing primitives …

A Message Passing Interface For Parallel And Distributed Computing, Salim Hariri, Jongbaek Park, Fang-Kuo Yu, Manish Parashar

Northeast Parallel Architecture Center

The proliferation of high performance workstations and the emergence of high speed networks have attracted a lot of interest in parallel and distributed computing (PDC). We envision that PDC environments with supercomputing capabilities will be available in the near future. However, a number of hardware and software issues have to be resolved before the full potential of these PDC environments can be exploited. The presented research has the following objectives: (1) to characterize the message-passing primitives used in parallel and distributed computing; (2) to develop a communication protocol that supports PDC; and (3) to develop an architectural support for PDC …

Data Flow Program Graphs, Alan L. Davis, Robert M. Keller

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

Data flow languages form a subclass of the languages which are based primarily upon function application (i.e., applicative languages). By data flow language we mean any applicative language based entirely upon the notion of data flowing from one function entity to another or any language that directly supports such flowing. This flow concept gives data flow languages the advantage of allowing program definitions to be represented exclusively by graphs. Graphical representations and their applications are the subject of this article.