Systems Seminar: Mary Vernon, University of Wisconsin

Scalable Streaming Media System Design and Implementation

photograph of Mary Vernon.

Date: 2003 Mar 3
Time: 3:30 - 5:00
Location: 5409 Wean

Abstract

Access to real-time video and more complicated multimedia data (e.g., immersive 3D environments) at any time from any location promises to be a next step in the ongoing impact of the Internet in arenas such as education, electronic commerce, and entertainment. Toward that goal, the SWORD Project is using a combination of system modeling and system prototyping to design scalable on-demand digital streaming systems for popular, widely shared multimedia files. This talk will survey some of our recent results, including (1) new streaming protocols that are relatively simple to implement and achieve nearly the best possible scalability for the given client characteristics and desirable/feasible media quality, (2) server configurations that have negligible wait for service, (3) a comparison between the scalable streaming protocols and previous scalable download protocols in contexts where substantial start-up latencies can be tolerated, and (4) the design of the SWORD scalable streaming prototype that delivers media server content, transparently, to hundreds of students at the University of Wisconsin.

Speaker Bio

Mary Vernon is a Professor and Vilas Associate in Computer Science and Industrial Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include performance analysis techniques for evaluating computer system design tradeoffs, scalable streaming media servers, computer system security, and parallel architectures and systems. She received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985 the ACM Fellow award in 1996, and the University of Wisconsin Vilas Associate award in 2000. She has served on the NSF Blue Ribbon Panel for High Performance Computing, the editorial board for the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, as Vice Chair and Chair of the ACM SIGMETRICS, and is currently a co-director of the National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA).


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