Integrating multimedia streams into a distributed computing system

Continuous media, such as audio and video, are quickly becoming an integral part of distributed computing environments. A shortcoming of such environments is their lack of support for continuous flows of information. What is missing is the notion of an on-going communication activity with an associated quality of service. This paper describes a model for integrating multimedia flows into a distributed computing system. The model permits explicit bindings to be established between type-checked stream interfaces. The stream binding is represented in the computational model as a first-class object which encapsulates configuration rules and QoS attributes. An operational interface supplied by the binding object allows other objects within the system to manage the binding, to renegotiate QoS parameters, to control the flows across the binding, and to register interest in stream events such as flow reports and communication errors. The in-band stream interface is an abstract C++ wrapper around transport mechanisms that include intra-host IPC and network transport protocols such as TCP and XTP. A prototype implementation of this model is described using the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). The implementation environment comprises a local area ATM network with directly attached multimedia peripherals and general purpose workstations

A software approach for readout and data acquisition in CMS

Traditional systems dominated by performance constraints tend to neglect other qualities such as maintainability and configurability. Object-Orientation allows one to encapsulate the technology differences in communication sub-systems and to provide a uniform view of data transport layer to the systems engineer. We applied this paradigm to the design and implementation of intelligent data servers in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) data acquisition system at CERN to easily exploiting the physical communication resources of the available equipment. CMS is a high-energy physics experiment under study that incorporates a highly distributed data acquisition system. This paper outlines the architecture of one part, the so called Readout Unit, and shows how we can exploit the object advantage for systems with specific data rate requirements. A C++ streams communication layer with zero copying functionality has been established for UDP, TCP, DLPI and specific Myrinet and VME bus communication on the VxWorks real-time operating system. This software provides performance close to the hardware channel and hides communication details from the application programmers. (28 refs)

Performance Evaluation of Communication Software Systems for Distributed Computing

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in object-oriented distributed computing since it is better quipped to deal with complex systems while providing extensibility, maintainability, and reusability. At the same time, several new high-speed network technologies have emerged for local and wide area networks. However, the performance of networking software is not improving as fast as the networking hardware and the workstation microprocessors. This paper gives an overview and evaluates the performance of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard in a distributed computing environment at NASA Ames Research Center. The environment consists of two testbeds of SGI workstations connected by four networks: Ethernet, FDDI, HiPPI, and ATM. The performance results for three communication software systems are presented, analyzed and compared. These systems are: BSD socket programming interface, IONA's Orbix, an implementation of the CORBA specification, and the PVM message passing library. The results show that high-level communication interfaces, such as CORBA and PVM, can achieve reasonable performance under certain conditions

An Adaptive Integration Architecture for Software Reuse

The problem of building large, reliable software systems in a controlled, cost-effective way, the so-called software crisis problem, is one of computer science\u27s great challenges. From the very outset of computing as science, software reuse has been touted as a means to overcome the software crisis issue. Over three decades later, the software community is still grappling with the problem of building large reliable software systems in a controlled, cost effective way; the software crisis problem is alive and well. Today, many computer scientists still regard software reuse as a very powerful vehicle to improve the practice of software engineering. The advantage of amortizing software development cost through reuse continues to be a major objective in the art of building software, even though the tools, methods, languages, and overall understanding of software engineering have changed significantly over the years. Our work is primarily focused on the development of an Adaptive Application Integration Architecture Framework. Without good integration tools and techniques, reuse is difficult and will probably not happen to any significant degree. In the development of the adaptive integration architecture framework, the primary enabling concept is object-oriented design supported by the unified modeling language. The concepts of software architecture, design patterns, and abstract data views are used in a structured and disciplined manner to established a generic framework. This framework is applied to solve the Enterprise Application Integration (EM) problem in the telecommunications operations support system (OSS) enterprise marketplace. The proposed adaptive application integration architecture framework facilitates application reusability and flexible business process re-engineering. The architecture addresses the need for modern businesses to continuously redefine themselves to address changing market conditions in an increasingly competitive environment. We have developed a number of Enterprise Application Integration design patterns to enable the implementation of an EAI framework in a definite and repeatable manner. The design patterns allow for integration of commercial off-the-shelf applications into a unified enterprise framework facilitating true application portfolio interoperability. The notion of treating application services as infrastructure services and using business processes to combine them arbitrarily provides a natural way of thinking about adaptable and reusable software systems. We present a mathematical formalism for the specification of design patterns. This specification constitutes an extension of the basic concepts from many-sorted algebra. In particular, the notion of signature is extended to that of a vector, consisting of a set of linearly independent signatures. The approach can be used to reason about various properties including efforts for component reuse and to facilitate complex largescale software development by providing the developer with design alternatives and support for automatic program verification

Supporting distributed multiplayer RoboTable games

Lincoln University is cooperating with Tufts University, USA, on the development of a RoboTable to facilitate interaction between groups learning about robotics and engineering problem solving. A RoboTable is a mixed reality tabletop learning environment and provides a distributed learning platform with groups of children at remotely located tables interacting and competing on robotic projects. This project investigates the development and support of distributed multiplayer games using the RoboTable environment. Currently, there are no general-purpose tools to support RoboTable game development or distributed game play. Hence a gap exists to develop a robust solution that will allow distributed multiplayer games to be created and played using RoboTable. To address these issues, we have implemented a set of toolkits to support distributed multiplayer RoboTable game development. The toolkits comprise a Network Toolkit, a Robot Tracking Toolkit, a Game Management Toolkit and a Communication Toolkit. In addition, we have developed a skeleton project to help the game developers. To evaluate the toolkits, we have used a number of approaches. The first approach was a case study of the game development process using the toolkits. The second approach was to establish baseline performance benchmarks for the system. The third approach was to carry out experiments to evaluate their real-world performance and the scalability of the toolkits using the game created in the case study. The results from the experiments have shown that the toolkits perform well within a distributed computer environment. The results from the case study have revealed that the development of a new RoboTable game is straightforward

Um mecanismo para prover interoperalidade entre ORBs com suporte a transparencia de relocação

Orientador: Edmundo Roberto Mauro MadeiraDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: A capacidade de sistemas heterogêneos cooperarem é uma necessidade atual que vem se impondo cada vez mais, principalmente pelo rápido desenvolvimento da tecnologia de processamento distribuído, obrigando a busca de soluções mais apropriadas. Nesse contexto, a especificação CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) apresenta uma arquitetura que permite a interoperabilidade entre aplicações em ambientes distribuídos heterogêneos. Entretanto, pela sua grande flexibilidade nas decisões de implementação, surgem problemas para estender essa interoperabilidade entre dois ORBs desenvolvidos por diferentes tecnologias. Nesta dissertação são discutidos esses problemas e suas respectivas soluções, sendo apresentado um conjunto de operações para suportar o mecanismo de interceptação, estendendo as transparências de acesso e localização, consideradas fundamentais num ambiente distribuído, para além do escopo de um ORB. É proposta, também, uma forma para prover transparência de relocação, estendida para suportar interoperabilidade. Por fim, é descrita uma implementação desses mecanismos utilizando um protótipo aberto de ORB e uma implementação comercial, chamada ORBeline.Abstract: The ability of heterogeneous systems cooperate to problem's solutions is a real need that has been growing, due to the increasing development of the distributed processing technology. This need is driving the development of more suitable solutions. The CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) specification presents an architecture, which allows interoperability among heterogeneous distributed environment applications. However, because of the great flexibility offered in implementation decisions, many problems to extend interoperability between two ORBs developed by different technologies arise. This work discusses these problems and their solutions and presents a. set of operations to support an interception mechanism extending access and location transparencies, considered as fundamental for a distributed environment, to work beyond an ORB scope. A scheme to provide relocation transparency, extended to support interoperability is also proposed. Finally, an implementation of these mechanisms over an open ORB's prototype and ORBeline, a commercial product, is described.MestradoMestre em Ciência da Computaçã

Quantify uncertain emergency search techniques (QUEST) -- Theory and user`s guide

As recent world events show, criminal and terrorist access to nuclear materials is a growing national concern. The national laboratories are taking the lead in developing technologies to counter these potential threats to the national security. Sandia National laboratories, with support from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Bechtel Nevada, Remote Sensing Laboratory, has developed QUEST (a model to Quantify Uncertain Emergency Search Techniques), to enhance the performance of organizations in the search for lost or stolen nuclear material. In addition, QUEST supports a wide range of other applications, such as environmental monitoring, nuclear facilities inspections, and searcher training. QUEST simulates the search for nuclear materials and calculates detector response for various source types and locations. The probability of detecting a radioactive source during a search is a function of many different variables, including source type, search location and structure geometry (including shielding), search dynamics (path and speed), and detector type and size. Through calculation of dynamic detector response, QUEST makes possible quantitative comparisons of various sensor technologies and search patterns. The QUEST model can be used as a tool to examine the impact of new detector technologies, explore alternative search concepts, and provide interactive search/inspector training

Object-Oriented Components for High-speed Network Programming

This paper makes two contributions to the development and evaluation of object-oriented communication software. First, it reports performance results from benchmarking several network programming mechanisms (such as sockets and CORBA) on Ethernet and ATM networks. These results illustrate that developers of high-bandwidth, low-delay applications (such as interactive medical imaging or teleconferencing) must evaluate their performance requirements and the efficiency of their communication infrastructure carefully before adopting a distributed object solution. Second, the paper describes the software architecture and design principles of the ACE object-oriented network programming components. These components encapsulate UNIX and Windows NT network programming interfaces (such as sockets, TLI, and named pipes) with C++ wrappers. Developers of object-oriented communication software have traditionally had to choose between high-performance, lower-level interfaces provided by sockets or TLI..