Stampede: A Programming System for Emerging Scalable Interactive Multimedia Applications

Stampede is a programming system for emerging scalable applications on clusters. The goal is to simplify the programming of applications that are interactive (often using vision and speech), that have highly dynamic computation structures, and that must run on platforms consisting of a mix of front-end machines and high-performance back-end servers with a variety of processors and interconnects. We approach this goal by retaining, as far as possible, the well-known POSIX threads model currently in use on SMPs. Stampede offers cluster-wide threads with optional loose temporal synchrony, and consistently-cached distributed shared objects. A higher-level sharing/ communication mechanism called Space-Time Memory, with automatic garbage collection, is particularly suited to the complex buffer management that arises in real-time analysis hierarchies based on video and audio input. In this paper, we describe an example of our target class of applications, and describe features of Stampede that support cluster-based implementations of such applications.