Systems Seminar: Prof. Willy Zwaenepoel, Department of Computer Science, Rice University

Puppeteer: Component-based Adaptation for Mobile Computing

Abstract

Puppeteer is a system for adapting component-based applications in mobile environments. Puppeteer takes advantage of the component-based nature of the applications to perform adaptation without modifying the applications. We illustrate the power of Puppeteer by demonstrating adaptations that would otherwise require significant modifications to the application.

Our initial protoype supports Microsoft PowerPoint and Internet Explorer 5 without requiring any changes to the applications. It supports delayed data and image transmission as well as progressive image refinement. We measure our system's effectiveness with a large number of PowerPoint documents and Web pages. We measure user-perceived latencies for a variety of adaptation policies and over a variety of different network bandwidths. Our results show that Puppeteer can achieve average reductions in user latency of up to 84.22% for PowerPoint documents loaded over a 384 Kb/sec link and 76.42% for HTML documents loaded over 56 Kb/sec link.

This is joint work with Eyal de Lara and Dan Wallach of Rice University.

Speaker Bio

Willy Zwaenepoel received his B.S. from the University of Gent, Belgium in 1979, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1980 and 1984, respectively. Since 1984, he has been on the faculty at Rice University, where he is presently Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering. His interests are in all aspects of workstation cluster computing. While at Stanford, he was involved in the design and implementation of the V-System. At Rice, he has worked on two distributed shared memory systems, Munin and TreadMarks, on checkpoint/restart through coordinated checkpointing and message logging in the Manetho system. He has also worked with Alejandro Schaffer on FASTLINK, a project to provide fast sequential and parallel genetic linkage analysis software. Another recent project, ScalaServer, focuses on system support for scalable network servers.