Advanced media - oriented systems research : ubiquitous capture , interpretation , and access

One major component of our efforts continues to be centered around developing technologies for interactive, high-performance, distributed applications. Our work in this area has been jointly funded by NSF and DOE. During the last year, we have (1) developed realistic applications jointly with end users, (2) created adaptive middleware technologies to better cope with dynamic changes in resources available to such applications, and (3) studied application execution and performance with adaptive middleware on representative testbeds (additional funding from HP and Intel). The key problem addressed by our research is the dynamic nature of distributed hardware resources used by high performance applications coupled with the dynamic changes in end user needs. Interactive applications will be useful to end users only if certain quality of service (QoS) needs are continuously met, throughout an interactive session. One specific example studied by our group, jointly with researchers from DOE Oakridge, is an interactive molecular dynamics application, described in detail in [1] The novel nature of this application lies in its ability to dynamically customize end users’ views of shared scientific data, whether such data is in storage, is being produced by a running simulation, or is derived from remote