Article

Free access

Space-time memory: a parallel programming abstraction for interactive multimedia applications

Authors:

Umakishore Ramachandran,

Rishiyur S. Nikhil,

Kathleen KnobeAuthors Info & Claims

PPoPP '99: Proceedings of the seventh ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming

Pages 183 - 192

https://doi.org/10.1145/301104.301121

Published: 01 May 1999 Publication History

Abstract

Realistic interactive multimedia involving vision, animation, and multimedia collaboration is likely to become an important aspect of future computer applications. The scalable parallelism inherent in such applications coupled with their computational demands make them ideal candidates for SMPs and clusters of SMPs. These applications have novel requirements that offer new kinds of challenges for parallel system design.We have designed a programming system called Stampede that offers many functionalities needed to simplify development of such applications (such as high-level data sharing abstractions, dynamic cluster-wide threads, and multiple address spaces). We have built Stampede and it runs on clusters of SMPs. To date we have implemented two applications on Stampede, one of which is discussed herein.In this paper we describe a part of Stampede called Space-Time Memory (STM). It is a novel data sharing abstraction that enables interactive multimedia applications to manage a collection of time-sequenced data items simply, efficiently, and transparently across a cluster. STM relieves the application programmer from low level synchronization and data communication by providing a high level interface that subsumes buffer management, inter-thread synchronization, and location transparency for data produced and accessed anywhere in the cluster. STM also automatically handles garbage collection of data items that will no longer be accessed by any of the application threads. We discuss ease of use issues for developing applications using STM, and present preliminary performance results to show that STM's overhead is low.

References

[1]

S. Ahuja, N. Carriero, and G. David. Linda and Friends. IEEE Computer, 19(8):26-34, August 1986.]]

Digital Library

[2]

H. E. Bal, A. E. Tanenbaum, and M. F. Kaashoek. Orca: A Language for Distributed Programming. A CM SIGPLAN Notices, 25(5):17-24, May 1990.]]

Digital Library

[3]

N. J. Boden, D. Cohen, R. E. Felderman, A. E. Kulawik, C. L. Seitz, J. N. Seizovic, and W.-K. Su. Myrinet- a gigabit-per-second local-area network, Draft 16 Nov 1994.]]

[4]

A. D. Christian and B. L. Avery. Digital Smart Kiosk Project. In ACM SIGCHI '98, pages 155-162, Los Angeles, CA, April 18-23 1998.]]

Digital Library

[5]

K. Ghosh and R. M. Fujimoto. Parallel Discrete Event Simulation Using Space-Time Memory. In 20th International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP), August 1991.]]

[6]

R. Gillett. MEMORY CHANNEL Network for PCI: An Optimized Cluster Interconnect. IEEE Micro, pages 12-18, February 1996.]]

Digital Library

[7]

R. W. Horst and D. Garcia. Servernet SAN I/O Architecture. In Hot interconnects Symposium V, Kresge Auditorium, Stanford University, Stanford CA, August 21-23 1997. See also www.servernet.com.]]

[8]

IEEE. Threads standard POSIX 1003.1c-1995 (also ISO/IEC 9945-1:1996), 1996.]]

[9]

D. R. Jefferson. Virtual Time. A CM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 7(3):404-425, July 1985.]]

Digital Library

[10]

S. B. Kang. A Survey of Image-based Rendering Techniques. Technical Report CRL 97/4, Cambridge Research Lab., Digital Equipment Corp., August 1997.]]

[11]

P. Keleher, A. Cox, S. Dwarkadas, and W. Zwaenepoel. TreadMarks: Distributed Shared Memory on Standard Workstations and Operating Systems. In Proc. Winter Usenix, 1994.]]

Digital Library

[12]

K. Knobe, J. M. Rehg, A. Chauhan, R. S. Nikhil, and U. Ramachandran. Dynamic Task and Data Parallelism Using Space-Time Memory. In preparation.]]

[13]

L. Kontothanassis, G. Hunt, R. Stets, N. Hardavellas, M. Cierniak, S. Parthasarathy, W. Meira, S. Dwarkadas, and M. Scott. VM-Based Shared Memory on Low-Latency Remote-Memory-Access Networks. In Proc. Intl. Syrup. on Computer Architecture (ISCA) 1997, Denver, Colorado, June 1997.]]

Digital Library

[14]

Message Passing Interface Forum. MPI: A Message- Passing Interface Standard, May 1994. www.mpiforum.org.]]

[15]

R. S. Nikhil. Cid: A Parallel "Shared-memory" C for Distributed Memory Machines. In Proc. 7th. An. Wkshp. on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing (LCPC), Ithaca, NY, Springer-Verlag LNCS 892, pages 376-390, August 8-10 1994.]]

Digital Library

[16]

R. S. Nikhil and U. Ramachandran. Garbage Collection of Timestamped Data in Stampede, January 1999. (submitted for publication).]]

Digital Library

[17]

J. M. Rehg, M. Loughlin, and K. Waters. Vision for a Smart Kiosk. In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pages 690-696, San Juan, Puerto Rico, June 17-19 1997.]]

Digital Library

[18]

J. M. Rehg, U. Ramachandran, R. H. Halstead, Jr., C. Joerg, L. Kontothanassis, and R. S. Nikhil. Space- Time Memory: A Parallel Programming Abstraction for Dynamic Vision Applications. Technical Report CRL 97/2, Digital Equipment Corp. Cambridge Research Lab, April 1997.]]

[19]

D. J. Scales, K. Gharachorloo, and C. A. Thekkath. Shasta: A Low Overhead, Software-Only Approach for Supporting Fine-Grain Shared Memory. In Proe. 7th. ASPLOS, Boston MA, October 1996.]]

Digital Library

[20]

A. Singla, U. Ramachandran, and J. Hodgins. Temporal Notions of Synchronization and Consistency in Beehive. In 9th Annual A CM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures, June 1997.]]

Digital Library

[21]

K. Waters and T. Levergood. An Automatic Lip- Synchronization Algorithm for Synthetic Faces. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 1(4):349-366, Nov 1995.]]

[22]

K. Waters, J. M. Rehg, M. Loughlin, S. B. Kang, and D. Terzopoulos. Visual Sensing of Humans for Active Public Interfaces. In R. Cipolla and A. Pentland, editors, Computer Vision for Human-Machine Interaction, pages 83-96. Cambridge University Press, 1998.]]

Cited By

Liang Chen HanWei Shen Gagan Agrawal (2008)Supporting a visualization application on a self-adapting grid middleware2008 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing10.1109/IPDPS.2008.4536208(1-8)Online publication date: Apr-2008
https://doi.org/10.1109/IPDPS.2008.4536208
Harel NMandviwala HRamachandran UKnobe K(2007)Use of Dependency Information for Memory Optimizations in Distributed Streaming Applications2007 16th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks10.1109/ICCCN.2007.4317901(712-717)Online publication date: Aug-2007
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCN.2007.4317901
Mandviwala HRamachandran UKnobe K(2007)CapsulesLanguages and Compilers for Parallel Computing10.1007/978-3-540-85261-2_19(276-291)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-540-85261-2_19
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Space-time memory: a parallel programming abstraction for interactive multimedia applications
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Concurrent computing methodologies
    1. Concurrent programming languages
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Concurrent programming languages
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Process management

Recommendations

Space-time memory: a parallel programming abstraction for interactive multimedia applications

Realistic interactive multimedia involving vision, animation, and multimedia collaboration is likely to become an important aspect of future computer applications. The scalable parallelism inherent in such applications coupled with their computational ...
Progressive Transactional Memory in Time and Space
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Parallel Computing Technologies - Volume 9251

Transactional memory TM allows concurrent processes to organize sequences of operations on shared data items into atomic transactions. A transaction may commit, in which case it appears to have executed sequentially or it may abort, in which case no ...
Software transactional memory validation – time and space considerations
Transactions on High-Performance Embedded Architectures and Compilers IV

With single thread performance hitting the power wall, hardware architects have turned to chip-level multiprocessing to increase processor performance. As a result, issues related to the construction of scalable and reliable multi-threaded applications ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

PPoPP '99: Proceedings of the seventh ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming

May 1999

192 pages

ISBN:1581131003

DOI:10.1145/301104

Chairmen:
Marc Snir
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY
,
Andrew A. Chien
Univ. of California, San Diego, San Diego

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 34, Issue 8
Aug. 1999
192 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/329366
Editor:
A. Michael Burman
Rowan Univ., Glassboro, NJ
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 1999 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 May 1999

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

PPoPP99

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

PPoPP99: Symposium on Principles & Practice of Parallel Programming

May 4 - 6, 1999

Georgia, Atlanta, USA

Acceptance Rates

PPoPP '99 Paper Acceptance Rate 17 of 79 submissions, 22%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 230 of 1,014 submissions, 23%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

29
Total Citations
View Citations
660
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)190
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)14

Reflects downloads up to 12 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Liang Chen HanWei Shen Gagan Agrawal (2008)Supporting a visualization application on a self-adapting grid middleware2008 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing10.1109/IPDPS.2008.4536208(1-8)Online publication date: Apr-2008
https://doi.org/10.1109/IPDPS.2008.4536208
Harel NMandviwala HRamachandran UKnobe K(2007)Use of Dependency Information for Memory Optimizations in Distributed Streaming Applications2007 16th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks10.1109/ICCCN.2007.4317901(712-717)Online publication date: Aug-2007
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCN.2007.4317901
Mandviwala HRamachandran UKnobe K(2007)CapsulesLanguages and Compilers for Parallel Computing10.1007/978-3-540-85261-2_19(276-291)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-540-85261-2_19
Chen LAgrawal G(2006)Supporting self-adaptation in streaming data mining applicationsProceedings of the 20th international conference on Parallel and distributed processing10.5555/1898953.1899008(76-76)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1898953.1899008
Chen LZhu QAgrawal GHorner-Miller B(2006)Supporting dynamic migration in tightly coupled grid applicationsProceedings of the 2006 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing10.1145/1188455.1188577(117-es)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1188455.1188577
Ramachandran UKnobe KHarel NMandviwala H(2006)Distributed Garbage Collection Algorithms for Timestamped DataIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2006.13817:10(1057-1071)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TPDS.2006.138
Chen LZhu QAgrawal G(2006)Supporting Dynamic Migration in Tightly Coupled Grid ApplicationsACM/IEEE SC 2006 Conference (SC'06)10.1109/SC.2006.58(28-28)Online publication date: Nov-2006
https://doi.org/10.1109/SC.2006.58
Liang Chen Agrawal G(2006)Supporting self-adaptation in streaming data mining applicationsProceedings 20th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium10.1109/IPDPS.2006.1639312(10 pp.)Online publication date: 2006
https://doi.org/10.1109/IPDPS.2006.1639312
Nijhuis MBos HBal H(2006)Supporting reconfigurable parallel multimedia applicationsProceedings of the 12th international conference on Parallel Processing10.1007/11823285_80(765-776)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/11823285_80
Mandviwala HHarel NRamachandran UKnobe K(2005)Adaptive Resource Utilization via Feedback Control for Streaming ApplicationsProceedings of the 19th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'05) - Papers - Volume 0110.1109/IPDPS.2005.81Online publication date: 4-Apr-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/IPDPS.2005.81
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents