Realistic interactive multimedia involving vision, animation, and multimedia collaboration is likely to become an important aspect of future computer applications. The scalable parallelism inherent in such applications coupled with their computational demands make them ideal candidates for SMPs and clusters of SMPs. These applications have novel requirements that offer new kinds of challenges for parallel system design.

We have designed a programming system called Stampede that offers many functionalities needed to simplify the development of such applications (such as high-level data sharing abstractions, dynamic cluster-wide threads, and multiple address spaces). We have built Stampede and it runs on clusters of SMPs.

The talk will describe a part of Stampede called Space-Time Memory (STM). It is a novel data sharing abstraction that enables interactive multimedia applications to manage a collection of time-sequenced data items simply, efficiently, and transparently across a cluster. STM relieves the application programmer from low level synchronization and data communication by providing a high level interface that subsumes buffer management, inter-thread synchronization, and location transparency for data produced and accessed anywhere in the cluster. STM also automatically handles garbage collection of data items that will no longer be accessed by any of the application threads. The talk will address both ease of use and performance issues.

Joint work with Rishiyur S. Nikhil, Umakishore Ramachandran, James M. Rehg, Arun Chauhan and Nissim Harel