22378536
Segmentation of multimedia streams for proxy caching
Proxy caching of large multimedia objects on the edge of the Internet has become increasingly important for reducing network latency. For a large media object, such as a two-hour video, treating the whole media as a single object for caching is not appropriate. In this paper, we study three media segmentation approaches to proxy caching: fixed, pyramid, and skyscraper. Blocks of a media stream are grouped into various segments for cache management. The cache admission and replacement policies attach different caching priorities to individual segments, taking into account the access frequency of the media object and the segment distance from the start of the media. These caching policies give preferential treatment to the beginning segments. As such, most user requests can be quickly played back from the proxy servers without delay. Event-driven simulations are conducted to evaluate the segmentation approaches and compare them with whole media caching. The results show that: 1) compared with whole media caching, segmentation-based caching is more effective not only in increased byte-hit ratio but also in lowered fraction of requests that requires delayed start; 2) pyramid segmentation, where segment size increases exponentially, is the best segmentation approach; and 3) segmentation-based caching is especially advantageous when the cache size is limited, when the set of hot media objects changes over time, when the media file size is large, and when there are a large number of distinct media objects.
36453760
Integrated approach to buffer management and query optimization
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>>
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.
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.
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>>
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.
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.
16133419
Executing Hardware as Parallel Software for Picoblaze Networks
Multi-processor architectures have gained interest recently because of their ability to exploit programmable silicon parallelism at acceptable power-efficiency figures. Despite the potential benefit they offer over single-processor architectures, it is unresolved how one can write compact and efficient programs for multiple parallel cores. In this paper, we propose the use of a synchronous hardware description language to program a network of small PicoBlaze processors. The partitioning of a multiprocessor program over multiple cores is straightforward because the input specification is fully parallel. A systematic transformation process converts the parallel input specification into concurrent PicoBlaze programs. We demonstrate the mapping of a cryptographic design (AES) onto four PicoBlaze processors, showing almost linear speedup over an equivalent single-core design