Sujoy Basu

Caching strategies in transcoding-enabled proxy systems for streaming media distribution networks

With the wide availability of high-speed network access, we are experiencing high quality streaming media delivery over the Internet. The emergence of ubiquitous computing enables mobile users to access the Internet with their laptops, PDAs, or even cell phones. When nomadic users connect to the network via wireless links or phone lines, high quality video transfer can be problematic due to long delay or size mismatch between the application display and the screen. Our proposed solution to this problem is to enable network proxies with the transcoding capability, and hence provide different, appropriate video quality to different network environment. The proxies in our transcoding-enabled caching (TeC) system perform transcoding as well as caching for efficient rich media delivery to heterogeneous network users. This design choice allows us to perform content adaptation at the network edges. We propose three different TeC caching strategies. We describe each algorithm and discuss its merits and shortcomings. We also study how the user access pattern affects the performance of TeC caching algorithms and compare them with other approaches. We evaluate TeC performance by conducting two types of simulation. Our first experiment uses synthesized traces while the other uses real traces derived from an enterprise media server logs. The results indicate that compared with the traditional network caches, with marginal transcoding load, TeC improves the cache effectiveness, decreases the user-perceived latency, and reduces the traffic between the proxy and the content origin server.

S 3 : a scalable sensing service for monitoring large networked systems

Efficiently operating and managing large scale distributed and federated systems is an extremely challenging problem. Current solutions are a combination of centralized management and significant over-provisioning of the infrastructure. With the explosion of new resource-intensive media applications and services, over provisioning of the infrastructure is no longer a viable option. Timely and accurate knowledge of the global environment (particularly the highly dynamic network path properties) is necessary for management of performance SLAs, just-in-time resource provisioning, near-optimal dynamic service placement and reuse, construction of network service overlays, and fast detection of failures and malicious attacks. Further, different applications require information about different aspects of the environment at different timescales. We propose S3, a Scalable Sensing Service, that achieves the above requirements and enables personalized sensing of the environment as dictated by applications.

NodeWiz: peer-to-peer resource discovery for grids

Efficient resource discovery based on dynamic attributes such as CPU utilization and available bandwidth is a crucial problem in the deployment of computing grids. Existing solutions are either centralized or unable to answer advanced resource queries (e.g., range queries) efficiently. We present the design of NodeWiz, a grid information service (CIS) that allows multi-attribute range queries to be performed efficiently in a distributed manner. This is obtained by aggregating the directory services of individual organizations in a peer-to-peer information service.

Measuring bandwidth between planetlab nodes

With the lack of end-to-end QoS guarantees on existing networks, applications that require certain performance levels resort to periodic measurements of network paths. Typical metrics of interest are latency, bandwidth and loss rates. While the latency metric has been the focus of many research studies, the bandwidth metric has received comparatively little attention. In this paper, we report our bandwidth measurements between PlanetLab nodes and analyze various trends and insights from the data. For this work, we assessed the capabilities of several existing bandwidth measurement tools and describe the difficulties in choosing suitable tools as well as using them on PlanetLab.

Bandwidth-Aware Routing in Overlay Networks

In the absence of end-to-end quality of service (QoS), overlay routing has been used as an alternative to the default best effort Internet routing. Using end-to-end network measurement, the problematic parts of the path can be bypassed, resulting in improving the resiliency and robustness to failures. Studies have shown that overlay paths can give better latency, loss rate, and TCP throughput. Overlay routing also offers flexibility as different routes can be used based on application needs. There have been very few proposals of using bandwidth as the main metric of interest, which is of great concern in media applications. We introduce our scheme BARON (Bandwidth-Aware Routing in Overlay Networks) that utilizes capacity between the end hosts to identify viable overlay paths and measures available bandwidth to select the best route. We propose our path selection approaches, and using the measurements between 174 PlanetLab nodes and over 13,189 paths, we evaluate the usefulness of overlay routes in terms of bandwidth gain. Our results show that among 658,526 overlay paths, 25% have larger bandwidth than their native IP routes, and over 86% of (source, destination) pairs have at least one overlay route with larger bandwidth than the default IP routes. We also present the effectiveness of BARON in preserving the bandwidth requirement over time for a few selected Internet paths.

Fusion: Managing Healthcare Records at Cloud Scale

An experimental open, cloud-based platform for large-scale, low-cost delivery of healthcare applications enables broader use of patient-centric management of electronic health records and facilitates the secure and seamless sharing of EHRs among stakeholders within a healthcare system.

mmGrid: distributed resource management infrastructure for multimedia applications

We are developing mmGrid (Multimedia Grid) as an extensible middleware architecture supporting multimedia applications in a grid computing environment. Our vision is to provide support for interactive applications from the following domains: graphics, visualization, streaming media and tele-immersion. The initial deployment will be within an enterprise as a mechanism for provisioning computing resources. However the scheduling system of mmGrid will be flexible, and will allow interactive and batch jobs to use the grid-computing paradigm. This paper presents our argument for using remote display technology in this environment. We also report on the use cases we support at this point, the system architecture for mmGrid and our research directions.

Web Service Dependency Discovery Tool for SOA Management

In this paper we identify the importance of the problem of discovering dynamic dependencies among Web services. The approach we take is to automate the identification of traces of dependent messages, based on the correlation of messages exchanged among services. We infer service dependencies based on the correlated message traces.

A resource management framework for interactive Grids

Traditional use of Grid computing systems has been for batch jobs in the scientific and academic computing. We envision the next generation Grid computing systems to support graphical interactive sessions. In this paper, we propose a resource management framework for supporting graphical interactive sessions in a Grid computing system. We describe the high‐level architectural resource management framework distributed among the submission node, central scheduler node, and the execution node. We then describe in detail the resource management framework on the execution node. The description of the resource management framework on the scheduler node is kept at a high level in this paper. The framework on execution nodes consists of Resource Management Agents, an Admission Control system and Application Predictor system. The agents on the execution node are Startup Agents, Sensor Agents, Monitoring Agents, Aggregator Agents, Enforcement Agents and Registration Agents. The Session Admission Control system is responsible for determining if a new application session can be admitted to the execution node. An Application Predictor system is responsible for predicting the resource utilization behavior of applications based on data obtained from the Resource Management Agents. The proposed framework allows for implementation of a scalable and extensible middleware for interactive Grid resource management. It supports fine‐grained performance guarantees specified in service level agreements and brings forth some important and novel contributions to enable graphical interactive sessions on Grids. Copyright

Making processes from best practice frameworks actionable

Best-practice frameworks provide guidance for organizing work in business. They enable reuse of experience within a domain. However, best practice frameworks are general and usually cover broad domains. Their guidance thus is often offered at an abstract level rather than as details of actionable tasks and processes to accomplish work. This paper presents an approach to bridge the gap between the abstractions available in best practice framework and actions that have to be performed by people or systems in a repeatable manner. We identify knowledge from best practices frameworks, categorize it and represent it in the form of reusable, interpretable templates. Template interpretation guides the refinement process from general concepts of best practices frameworks into actionable concepts such as specific tasks to be performed by assigned roles. A prototype implemented to validate the approach is also described.