Distributed storage manager system for synchronized and scalable AV services across networks

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund - Copyright @ 2011 Hindawi Publishing CorporationThis paper provides an innovative solution, namely, the distributed storage manager that opens a new path for highly interactive and personalized services. The distributed storage manager provides an enhancement to the MHP storage management functionality acting as a value added middleware distributed across the network. The distributed storage manager system provides multiple protocol support for initializing and downloading both streamed and file-based content and provides optimum control mechanisms to organize the storing and retrieval of content that are remained accessible to other multiple heterogeneous devices

The P3 platform: an approach and software system for developing diagrammatic model-based methods in design research

Many issues in design and design management have been explored by building models which capture the relationships between different aspects of the problem at hand. These models require computer support to construct and analyse. However, appropriate modelling tools can be time-consuming to develop in a research environment. Reflecting upon five design research projects, this paper proposes that such projects can be facilitated by recognising the iterative and tightly-coupled nature of research and tool development, and by attempting to minimise the effort of solution prototyping within this process. Our approach is enabled by a software platform which can be rapidly configured to implement many conceivable modelling approaches. This configurability is complemented by an emerging library of modelling and analysis approaches tailored to explore design process systems. The platform-based approach enables any mix of modelling concepts to be easily created. We propose it could thus help researchers to explore a wide range of questions without being constrained to existing conventions for modelling – or for model integration

The Hyperion system: Compiling multithreaded Java bytecode for distributed execution

A preliminary version of this work has been presented as a Distinguished Paper at the Euro-Par 2000 Conference, Munich, Germany, August 2000.International audienceOur work combines Java compilation to native code with a runtime library that executes Java threads in a distributed memory environment. This allows a Java programmer to view a cluster of processors as executing a single JAVA virtual machine. The separate processors are simply resources for executing Java threads with true parallelism, and the run-time system provides the illusion of a shared memory on top of the private memories of the processors. The environment we present is available on top of several UNIX systems and can use a large variety of communication interfaces thanks to the high portability of its run time system. To evaluate our approach, we compare serial C, serial Java, and multithreaded Java implementations of a branch and-bound solution to the minimal-cost map-coloring problem. All measurements have been carried out on two platforms using two different communication interfaces: SISCI/SCI and MPI BIP/Myrinet

Vcluster: A Portable Virtual Computing Library For Cluster Computing

Message passing has been the dominant parallel programming model in cluster computing, and libraries like Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Portable Virtual Machine (PVM) have proven their novelty and efficiency through numerous applications in diverse areas. However, as clusters of Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) and heterogeneous machines become popular, conventional message passing models must be adapted accordingly to support this new kind of clusters efficiently. In addition, Java programming language, with its features like object oriented architecture, platform independent bytecode, and native support for multithreading, makes it an alternative language for cluster computing. This research presents a new parallel programming model and a library called VCluster that implements this model on top of a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The programming model is based on virtual migrating threads to support clusters of heterogeneous SMP machines efficiently. VCluster is implemented in 100% Java, utilizing the portability of Java to address the problems of heterogeneous machines. VCluster virtualizes computational and communication resources such as threads, computation states, and communication channels across multiple separate JVMs, which makes a mobile thread possible. Equipped with virtual migrating thread, it is feasible to balance the load of computing resources dynamically. Several large scale parallel applications have been developed using VCluster to compare the performance and usage of VCluster with other libraries. The results of the experiments show that VCluster makes it easier to develop multithreading parallel applications compared to conventional libraries like MPI. At the same time, the performance of VCluster is comparable to MPICH, a widely used MPI library, combined with popular threading libraries like POSIX Thread and OpenMP. In the next phase of our work, we implemented thread group and thread migration to demonstrate the feasibility of dynamic load balancing in VCluster. We carried out experiments to show that the load can be dynamically balanced in VCluster, resulting in a better performance. Thread group also makes it possible to implement collective communication functions between threads, which have been proved to be useful in process based libraries

Digital television applications

Studying development of interactive services for digital television is a leading edge area of work as there is minimal research or precedent to guide their design. Published research is limited and therefore this thesis aims at establishing a set of computing methods using Java and XML technology for future set-top box interactive services. The main issues include middleware architecture, a Java user interface for digital television, content representation and return channel communications. The middleware architecture used was made up of an Application Manager, Application Programming Interface (API), a Java Virtual Machine, etc., which were arranged in a layered model to ensure the interoperability. The application manager was designed to control the lifecycle of Xlets; manage set-top box resources and remote control keys and to adapt the graphical device environment. The architecture of both application manager and Xlet forms the basic framework for running multiple interactive services simultaneously in future set-top box designs. User interface development is more complex for this type of platform (when compared to that for a desktop computer) as many constraints are set on the look and feel (e.g., TV-like and limited buttons). Various aspects of Java user interfaces were studied and my research in this area focused on creating a remote control event model and lightweight drawing components using the Java Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) and Java Media Framework (JMF) together with Extensible Markup Language (XML). Applications were designed aimed at studying the data structure and efficiency of the XML language to define interactive content. Content parsing was designed as a lightweight software module based around two parsers (i.e., SAX parsing and DOM parsing). The still content (i.e., text, images, and graphics) and dynamic content (i.e., hyperlinked text, animations, and forms) can then be modeled and processed efficiently. This thesis also studies interactivity methods using Java APIs via a return channel. Various communication models are also discussed that meet the interactivity requirements for different interactive services. They include URL, Socket, Datagram, and SOAP models which applications can choose to use in order to establish a connection with the service or broadcaster in order to transfer data. This thesis is presented in two parts: The first section gives a general summary of the research and acts as a complement to the second section, which contains a series of related publications.reviewe

Cluster Computing with Single Thread Space

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