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Observing systems facilitate scientific studies by instrumenting the real world and collecting corresponding measurements, with the aim of detecting and tracking phenomena of interest. A wide range of critical environmental monitoring objectives in resource management, environmental protection, and public health all require distributed observing systems. The goal of such systems is to help scientists verify or falsify hypotheses with useful samples taken by the stationary and mobile units, as well as to analyze data autonomously to discover interesting trends or alarming conditions. In our project, we focus on a class of observing systems which are embedded into the environment, consist of stationary and mobile sensors, and react to collected observations by reconfiguring the system and adapting which observations are collected next. In this paper, we give an overview of our project in the context of a marine biology application.

Observing systems facilitate scientific studies by instrumenting the real world and collecting corresponding measurements, with the aim of detecting and tracking phenomena of interest. A wide range of critical environmental monitoring objectives in resource management, environmental protection, and public health all require distributed observing systems. The goal of such systems is to help scientists verify or falsify hypotheses with useful samples taken by the stationary and mobile units, as well as to analyze data autonomously to discover interesting trends or alarming conditions. In our project, we focus on a class of observing systems which are embedded into the environment, consist of stationary and mobile sensors, and react to collected observations by reconfiguring the system and adapting which observations are collected next. In this paper, we give an overview of our project in the context of a marine biology application.

Our work is motivated by the problem of managing data on storage devices, typically a set of disks. Such high demand storage servers are used as web servers or multimedia servers, for handling high demand for data. As the system is running, it needs to dynamically respond to changes in demand for different data items. There are known algorithms for mapping demand to a layout. When the demand changes, a new layout is computed. In this work we study the data migration problem, which arises when we need to quickly change one layout to another. This problem has been studied earlier when for each disk the new layout has been prescribed. However, lack of such information leads to an interesting problem that we call the correspondence problem, whose solution has a significant impact on the solution for the data migration problem. We examine algorithms for the data migration problem in more detail and identify variations of the basic algorithm that seem to improve performance in practice, even though some of the variations have poor worst case behavior. UMIACS-TR-2003-115

Our work is motivated by the problem of managing data on storage devices, typically a set of disks. Such high demand storage servers are used as web servers or multimedia servers, for handling high demand for data. As the system is running, it needs to dynamically respond to changes in demand for different data items. There are known algorithms for mapping demand to a layout. When the demand changes, a new layout is computed. In this work we study the data migration problem, which arises when we need to quickly change one layout to another. This problem has been studied earlier when for each disk the new layout has been prescribed. However, lack of such information leads to an interesting problem that we call the correspondence problem, whose solution has a significant impact on the solution for the data migration problem. We examine algorithms for the data migration problem in more detail and identify variations of the basic algorithm that seem to improve performance in practice, even though some of the variations have poor worst case behavior. UMIACS-TR-2003-115

The viability of large-scale multimedia applications, depends on the performance of storage systems. Providing cost-effective access to vast amounts of video, image, audio, and text data, requires (a) proper configuration of storage hierarchies as well as (b) efficient resource management techniques at all levels of the storage hierarchy. The resulting complexities of the hardware/software co-design in turn contribute to difficulties in making accurate predictions about performance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of a storage system. Moreover, poor decisions at design time can be costly and problematic to correct in later stages of development. Hence, measurement of systems after they have been developed is not a desirable approach to predicting their performance. What is needed is the ability to evaluate the system's design while there are still opportunities to make corrections to fundamental design flaws. In this paper we describe the framework of ViPEr-HiSS, a tool which facilitates design, development, and subsequent performance evaluation of designs of multimedia storage hierarchies by providing mechanisms for relatively easy experimentation with (a) system configurations as well as (b) application- and media-aware resource management techniques. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-99-69)

The viability of large-scale multimedia applications, depends on the performance of storage systems. Providing cost-effective access to vast amounts of video, image, audio, and text data, requires (a) proper configuration of storage hierarchies as well as (b) efficient resource management techniques at all levels of the storage hierarchy. The resulting complexities of the hardware/software co-design in turn contribute to difficulties in making accurate predictions about performance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of a storage system. Moreover, poor decisions at design time can be costly and problematic to correct in later stages of development. Hence, measurement of systems after they have been developed is not a desirable approach to predicting their performance. What is needed is the ability to evaluate the system's design while there are still opportunities to make corrections to fundamental design flaws. In this paper we describe the framework of ViPEr-HiSS, a tool which facilitates design, development, and subsequent performance evaluation of designs of multimedia storage hierarchies by providing mechanisms for relatively easy experimentation with (a) system configurations as well as (b) application- and media-aware resource management techniques. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-99-69)

Many modern applications can benefit from sharing of resources such as network bandwidth, disk bandwidth, and so on. In addition, many information systems store (or would like to store) data that can be of use to many different classes of applications, e.g., digital libraries type systems. Part of the difficulty in efficient resource management of such systems can then occur when these applications have vastly different performance and quality-of-service (QoS) requirements as well as resource demand characteristics. In this work we present a performance study of a multimedia storage system which serves multiple types of workloads, specifically a mixture of real-time and non-real-time workloads, by allowing sharing of resources among these different workloads while satisfying their performance requirements and QoS constraints. The broad aim of this work is to examine the issues and tradeoffs associated with mixing multiple workloads on the same server to explore the possibility of maintaining reasonable performance and QoS requirements without having to partition the resources. The main contribution of this work is the exposition of the tradeoffs involved in resource management in such systems. Although many different resources can be considered, here we concentrate mostly on the I/O bandwidth resource. The performance metrics of interest are the mean and variance of the response time for the non-real-time applications and the probability of missing a deadline for the real-time applications. The increased use of buffer space resources is also considered as a tradeoff for improvements in the above stated performance metrics, i.e., response time and probability of missing deadlines. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-98-30)

Many modern applications can benefit from sharing of resources such as network bandwidth, disk bandwidth, and so on. In addition, many information systems store (or would like to store) data that can be of use to many different classes of applications, e.g., digital libraries type systems. Part of the difficulty in efficient resource management of such systems can then occur when these applications have vastly different performance and quality-of-service (QoS) requirements as well as resource demand characteristics. In this work we present a performance study of a multimedia storage system which serves multiple types of workloads, specifically a mixture of real-time and non-real-time workloads, by allowing sharing of resources among these different workloads while satisfying their performance requirements and QoS constraints. The broad aim of this work is to examine the issues and tradeoffs associated with mixing multiple workloads on the same server to explore the possibility of maintaining reasonable performance and QoS requirements without having to partition the resources. The main contribution of this work is the exposition of the tradeoffs involved in resource management in such systems. Although many different resources can be considered, here we concentrate mostly on the I/O bandwidth resource. The performance metrics of interest are the mean and variance of the response time for the non-real-time applications and the probability of missing a deadline for the real-time applications. The increased use of buffer space resources is also considered as a tradeoff for improvements in the above stated performance metrics, i.e., response time and probability of missing deadlines. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-98-30)

Many modern applications can benefit from sharing of resources such as network bandwidth, disk bandwidth, and so on. In addition, many information systems store (or would like to store) data that can be of use to many different classes of applications, e.g., digital libraries type systems. Part of the difficulty in efficient resource management of such systems can then occur when these applications have vastly different performance and quality-of-service (QoS) requirements as well as resource demand characteristics. In this work we present a performance study of a multimedia storage system which serves multiple types of workloads, specifically a mixture of real-time and non-real-time workloads, by allowing sharing of resources among these different workloads while satisfying their performance requirements and QoS constraints. The broad aim of this work is to examine the issues and tradeoffs associated with mixing multiple workloads on the same server to explore the possibility of maintaining reasonable performance and QoS requirements without having to partition the resources. The main contribution of this work is the exposition of the tradeoffs involved in resource management in such systems. Although many different resources can be considered, here we concentrate mostly on the I/O bandwidth resource. The performance metrics of interest are the mean and variance of the response time for the non-real-time applications and the probability of missing a deadline for the real-time applications. The increased use of buffer space resources is also considered as a tradeoff for improvements in the above stated performance metrics, i.e., response time and probability of missing deadlines. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-98-30)