SIGMETRICS

This paper seeks to bridge the gap between theory and practice of real-time scheduling in the domain of high speed multimedia networking. We show that the strict preemptive nature of real-time scheduling leads to more context switching, and requires ...

We measure the distribution of lifetimes for UNIX processes and propose a functional form that fits this distribution well. We use this functional form to derive a policy for preemptive migration, and then use a trace-driven simulator to compare our ...

We present a distributed algorithm for time-sharing parallel workloads that is competitive with coscheduling. Implicit scheduling allows each local scheduler in the system to make independent decisions that dynamically coordinate the scheduling of ...

This paper presents new analytical models of the performance benefits of multithreading and prefetching, and experimental measurements of parallel applications on the MIT Alewife multiprocessor. For the first time, both techniques are evaluated on a ...

Message assembly and disassembly represent a significant fraction of total communication time in many parallel systems. We introduce a run-time approach for fast message assembly and disassembly. The approach is based on generating addresses by decoding ...

An important issue in multiprogrammed multiprocessor systems is the scheduling of parallel jobs. Most research in the area has focussed solely on the allocation of processors to jobs. However, since memory is also a critical resource for many parallel ...

This paper describes Embra, a simulator for the processors, caches, and memory systems of uniprocessors and cache-coherent multiprocessors. When running as part of the SimOS simulation environment, Embra models the processors of a MIPS R3000/R4000 ...

Simulation is a critical tool in developing, testing, and evaluating network protocols and architectures. This paper describes x-Sim, a network simulator based on the x-kernel, that is able to fully simulate the topologies and traffic patterns of large ...

Lubachevsky [5] introduced a new parallel simulation technique intended for systems with limited interactions between their many components or sites. Each site has a local simulation time, and the states of the sites are updated asynchronously. This ...

In this paper we introduce and analyze frame-based fair queueing, a novel traffic scheduling algorithm for packet-switched networks. The algorithm provides end-to-end delay bounds identical to those of PGPS (packet-level generalized processor sharing), ...

Over the next several years the performance demands on globally available information servers are expected to increase dramatically. These servers must be capable of sending and receiving data over hundreds or even thousands of simultaneous connections. ...

The phenomenal growth in popularity of the World Wide Web (WWW, or the Web) has made WWW traffic the largest contributor to packet and byte traffic on the NSFNET backbone. This growth has triggered recent research aimed at reducing the volume of network ...

A large and increasing gap exists between processor and memory speeds in scalable cache-coherent multiprocessors. To cope with this situation, programmers and compiler writers must increasingly be aware of the memory hierarchy as they implement ...

Benchmarking is a widely used approach to measure computer performance. Current use of benchmarks only provides running times to describe the performance of a tested system. Glancing through these execution times provides little or no information about ...

Recently the notion of self-similarity has been shown to apply to wide-area and local-area network traffic. In this paper we examine the mechanisms that give rise to the self-similarity of network traffic. We present a hypothesized explanation for the ...

New applications require online access to many terabytes of data, but a magnetic disk storage system this large requires thousands of drives. Magnetic tape is be a good alternative, except that the application demand for transparent data retrieval is ...

Network attached storage devices improve I/O performance by separating control and data paths and eliminating host intervention during data transfer. Devices are attached to a high speed network for data transfer and to a slower network for control ...

The Earliest-Deadline-First (EDF) queueing discipline is being more and more widely used for handling time-sensitive applications in computer systems and networks. In this paper, we consider an arbitrary number of traffic classes with class-specific ...

A critical issue in the performance of a video-on-demand system is the I/O bandwidth required in order to satisfy client requests. A number of techniques have been proposed in order to reduce these bandwidth requirements. In this paper we concentrate on ...

In this paper we describe our experiments on digital video applications, concentrating on the static and dynamic tradeoffs involved in video playback. Our results were extracted from a controlled series of 272 tests, which we ran in three stages.In the ...

VBR compressed video is known to exhibit significant, multiple-time-scale bit rate variability. In this paper, we consider the transmission of stored video from a server to a client across a high speed network, and explore how the client buffer space ...

This paper presents an analysis of closed, balanced, fork-join queueing networks with exponential service time distributions. The fork-join queue is mapped onto two non-parallel networks, namely, a serial-join model and a state-dependent model. Using ...

Recently, a method to bound the steady-state availability using the failure distance concept has been proposed. In this paper we refine that method by introducing state space exploration techniques. In the methods proposed here, the state space is ...

Checkpointing with rollback-recovery is a well known technique to reduce the completion time of a program in the presence of failures. While checkpointing is corrective in nature, rejuvenation refers to preventive maintenance of software aimed to reduce ...

Parallel computers have matured to the point where they are capable of running a significant production workload. Characterizing this workload, however, is far more complicated than for the single-processor case. Besides the varying number of processors ...