GIT-CERCS-07-06
Radhika Niranjan, Ada Gavrilovska, Karsten Schwan, Priyanka Tembey,
Towards IQ-Appliances: Quality-awareness in Information Virtualization
Our research addresses two important problems that arise in modern large-scale
distributed systems: (1) the necessity to virtualize their data flows
by applying actions such as filtering, format translation, coalescing or
splitting, etc., and (2) the desire to separate such actions from enterprise
applications' business logic, to make it easier for future service-oriented
codes to interoperate in diverse and dynamic environments. This paper
considers the runtimes of the `information appliances' used for these
purposes, particularly with respect to their ability to provide diverse levels
of Quality of Service (QoS) in lieu of dynamic application behaviors and
the consequent changes in the resource needs of their data flows. Our specific
contribution is the enrichment of these runtimes with methods for
QoS-awareness, thereby giving them the ability to deliver desired levels of
QoS even under sudden requirement changes -- IQ-appliances.
For experimental evaluation, we
enrich a prototype implementation of an IQ-appliance,
based on the Intel IXP network processor with the additional functionality
needed to guarantee QoS constraints for diverse data streams. Measurements
demonstrate the feasibility and utility of the approach.