Workshop on New Challenges and Directions for Systems Research

Focus Group on System Support for Emerging Applications

Participants:

• Gary Nutt (organizer), University of Colorado
• Richard Muntz, UCLA
• Raj Rajkumar, CMU
• John Chapin, MIT

There is a new class of applications emerging in contemporary systems. It can be characterized as a collection of independent units (threads, objects, etc.) all providing services to a single user in a workstation environment. Some units perform traditional tasks, but others must manage graphics, images, continuous media, etc. A virtual environment is an example for this class of software.

This focus group addresses new challenges and directions in system research driven by the requirements of emerging applications. A set of strawman issues to be considered is:

• Where are the synergistic parts of traditional system disciplines, and how should they be combined to support this (and other) classes of applications?
• What are aspects of a computation model and API for these applications?
• There should be a general paradigm shift in resource allocation strategies -- away from unilateral decision making to decentralized policies. What is the range of paradigms that should be considered?
• How should scalability be supported from the server/WAN scenarios through desktop/LAN to embedded/clustered contexts.
• The OS needs to provide more information regarding things like per process resource usage; how should the OS call interface change?
• Resource management to satisfy different QoS metrics (specifically timeliness, reliability and security requirements)
• Distributed admission control for resource allocation in the presence of incomplete/inconsistent information
• Should this kind of resource allocation be managed by middleware? (Should middleware be treated differently than other application software?)
• Distributed real-time object services
• QoS-aware and bandwidth-aware many-to-many communication services
  • Co-existence with current protocols
  • A new real-time/multimedia NSFnet