Providing Operating System Support for more Efficient Group Communication
Event details
| Date | 22.06.2009 |
| Hour | 16:15 |
| Speaker | Prof. Tim Brecht, University of Waterloo, Canada |
| Location |
INM202
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Several important Internet-based applications such as audio and video conferencing and broadcasting, multiplayer on-line games, and computer supported cooperative work, are all required to send the same data to multiple recipients. Without IP-level multicast, this form of group communication is realized by unicasting the data to each desired recipient. Although this approach is portable and easy to implement, it is extremely inefficient for the sending host.
In this talk, we briefly describe the evolution of kernel-based techniques we have explored to efficiently facilitate unicast send operations for group communication. We propose a new system call, sendgroup(), and experimentally evaluate its performance using micro-benchmarks on three different operating systems. We then analyze the benefits of using sendgroup() within the popular Helix multimedia server. We first use use Amdahl's law to compute the expected benefits and then experimentally evaluate the Linux implementation. Our experiments demonstrate an efficiency improvement of 45% in a representative live-broadcasting scenario, closely matching the expected benefits derived using Amdahl's law.
This is joint work done with Martin Karsten, Michael Kwok, Elad Lahav, Jialin Song, Weihan Wang and Tony Zhao from the University of Waterloo.
Tim Brecht's homepage
Practical information
- General public
- Free