SMART: A Scheduler for Multimedia Applications

Jason Nieh
Computer Science Department
Stanford University

Thursday, Apr 30, 1998
1:00-2:15pm (special time)
 Interschool Lab, 7th floor, Schapiro CEPSR Bldg.

Host: Henning Schulzrinne

Abstract

Multimedia applications are increasingly populating the workstation desktop. However, operating systems lack the necessary resource management mechanisms and interfaces to support the real-time requirements of these applications. To address this problem, I created SMART, a Scheduler for Multimedia And Real-Time applications. SMART supports both real-time and conventional computations and provides flexible and accurate control over the allocation of processor time. I have implemented SMART in the Solaris UNIX operating system and measured its performance.

In this talk, I will present the design and implementation of SMART, describe how SMART helps to reduce the burden of developing applications with real-time constraints, and present some experimental measurements that quantitatively compare SMART versus other schedulers in executing real-time, interactive, and batch applications. The results demonstrate SMART's effectiveness in supporting multimedia applications.



Luis Gravano
gravano@cs.columbia.edu