15761755
Design and analysis of a look-ahead scheduling scheme to support pause-resume for video-on-demand applications
In a video-on-demand (VOD) system, subscribers can choose both the movie they wish to view and the time they wish to view it. In such an environment there are invariably “hot” videos which are requested by many viewers. The requirement that each viewer be able to independently pause the video at any instant and later resume the viewing with little delay can cause difficulties in batching viewers for each showing. Under batching, a single video stream is shared by multiple concurrent viewers and a resume request has to wait for additional stream capacity to become available before actual resumption can occur. The conventional approach to the support of on-demand pause-resume provides one video access stream to disks for each video request. This can greatly increase the disk arm requirements of a VOD system. In this paper, we propose a more efficient mechanism to support the pause-resume feature usinglook-ahead scheduling withlook-aside buffering. The idea is to use buffering to increase the number of concurrent viewers supportable. The concept of look-ahead scheduling is not to back up each viewer with a real stream capacity so he can pause and resume at any time, but rather with a (look-ahead) stream that is currently being used for another showing which is close to completion. Before the look-ahead stream becomes available, the pause and resume features have to be supported by the original stream through (look-aside) buffering of the missed content. It is shown via simulations that the proposed scheme can provide a substantially greater throughput than the approach without batching. Furthermore, for a given amount of buffer, the improvement in throughput grows more than linearly with the stream capacity of the server. In other words, the look-ahead stream scheduling scheme operates with good economy of scale because it is easier to form look-ahead streams for video servers with larger stream capacity.
16849208
The state of the art in locally distributed Web-server systems
The overall increase in traffic on the World Wide Web is augmenting user-perceived response times from popular Web sites, especially in conjunction with special events. System platforms that do not replicate information content cannot provide the needed scalability to handle large traffic volumes and to match rapid and dramatic changes in the number of clients. The need to improve the performance of Web-based services has produced a variety of novel content delivery architectures. This article will focus on Web system architectures that consist of multiple server nodes distributed on a local area, with one or more mechanisms to spread client requests among the nodes. After years of continual proposals of new system solutions, routing mechanisms, and policies (the first dated back to 1994 when the NCSA Web site had to face the first million of requests per day), many problems concerning multiple server architectures for Web sites have been solved. Other issues remain to be addressed, especially at the network application layer, but the main techniques and methodologies for building scalable Web content delivery architectures placed in a single location are settled now. This article classifies and describes main mechanisms to split the traffic load among the server nodes, discussing both the alternative architectures and the load sharing policies. To this purpose, it focuses on architectures, internal routing mechanisms, and dispatching request algorithms for designing and implementing scalable Web-server systems under the control of one content provider. It identifies also some of the open research issues associated with the use of distributed systems for highly accessed Web sites.
206711990
Performance comparison of active-sender and active-receiver policies for distributed caching
The authors propose a distributed caching approach to off-loading data access requests from overloaded data servers in a distributed system to nodes that are idle or less busy. Helping out the busy servers on data accesses, the idle or less busy nodes are called mutual servers. Frequently accessed data are cached in the main memory of mutual servers in addition to server and client local caches. The authors evaluate several data propagation strategies among data servers and mutual servers. Simulation results show that the active-sender passive-receiver policy is the method of choice in most cases. Active-sender policies are best able to exploit the main memory of other idle nodes in the expected normal condition where some nodes are overloaded and others are less loaded. All active policies perform far better than the policy without distributed caching.<<ETX>>
36453760
Integrated approach to buffer management and query optimization
14608892
A fully distributed framework for cost-sensitive data mining
We propose a fully distributed system (as compared to centralized and partially distributed systems) for cost-sensitive data mining. Experimental results have shown that this approach achieves higher accuracy than both the centralized and partially distributed learning methods, however, it incurs much less training time, neither communication nor computation overhead.
74977
Issues in the design of multi-server file systems to cope with load skew
It is observed that a large number of operations in many environments are to the files that are mostly-read and rarely updated. Such operations can be served by any server without incurring a high coherency. Several dynamic load balancing algorithms of various degrees of complexity that achieve high reduction in load skew albeit reducing the server buffer hit probability are proposed. It is shown using real workload traces that server load skew can be significantly reduced using these policies, and that there is an inherent tradeoff between load balancing and server buffer hit probability. Some variations of the proposed buddy-based policies which limit the number of replications of buffer pages seem to provide a good compromise between the two factors.<<ETX>>
3748150
Mesh blending
A new method for smoothly connecting different patches on triangle meshes with arbitrary connectivity, called mesh blending, is presented. A major feature of mesh blending is to move vertices of the blending region to a virtual blending surface by choosing an appropriate parameterization of those vertices. Once blending is completed, the parameterization optimization is performed to perfect the final meshes. Combining mesh blending with multiresolution techniques, an effective blending technique for meshes is obtained. Our method has several advantages: (1) the user can intuitively control the blending result using different blending radii, (2) the shape of cross-section curves can be adjusted to flexibly design complex models, and (3) the resulting mesh has the same connectivity as the original mesh. In this paper, some examples about smoothing, sharpening, and mesh editing show the efficiency of the method.
7510592
A matching pursuit technique for computing the simplest normal forms of vector fields
This paper presents a matching pursuit technique for computing the simplest normal forms of vector fields. First a simple, explicit recursive formula is derived for general differential equations, which reduces computation to the minimum. Then a matching pursuit technique is introduced and applied to the Takens-Bogdanov dynamical singularity. It is shown that unlike other methods for computing normal forms, the technique using matching pursuit does not need any algebraic constraints which are required for the existence of the simplest normal form. The efficient method and matching pursuit technique, which have been implemented using Maple, can be "automatically" executed on various computer systems. A number of examples are presented to demonstrate the advantages of the technique.
16104127
Bilateral Filter for Meshes Using New Predictor
A new predictor of bilateral filter for smoothing meshes is presented. It prevents shrinkage of corners. A major feature of mesh smoothing is to move every vertex along the direction determined by the mean curvature normal with speed defined by the predictor. It prevents unnatural deformation for irregular meshes. In order to remove thenormal noise, we use adaptive Gaussian filter to smooth triangle normals.