Middleware QoS Agents and Native Kernel Schedulers for Adaptive Multimedia Services and Cluster Servers

Emerging operating systems allow user applications ne grain control over their own resource allocations. This provides a promising approach for user applications to meet their timing constraints. In a distributed environment , however, resource allocation decisions must also be made across machine and traditional OS boundaries. As portable and mobile software entities, middleware agents can manage the resource needs of a wide range of applications in this setting. We are conducting research that combines a Java based agent framework (Bond) with So-laris based native OS schedulers (Concerto) supporting performance guarantees. We discuss our application of the synthesized architecture to an adaptive MPEG video server application.