United States Navy, San Diego (NRaD)

In 1995-1996, NRaD at San Diego sponsored research by the Performance and Parallel Processing Team concerning:

1. scheduling techniques for high performance WWW servers on scalable parallel machines;
2. porting the SWEB implementation to the NRaD Convex parallel machine, with the task of evaluating the performance of the parallel WWW server (SWEB) and redesigning the system based on the Convex architecture model;
3. carrying out research to evaluate the performance of such DL operations as wavelet-based image browsing in the Convex machine.

The main faculty and students involved these tasks are Yang, Andresen, Holmedahl, and Watson, with help from Ibarra and Poulakidas. During last year, the NRaD team (Wasilausky, Bui) and the UCSB team visited each other, and exchanged the ideas concerning system development and implementation. Since there are significant architectural differences between the Meiko CS-2 and SUN clusters on which SWEB is built on the one hand and NRaD's HP/Convex shared memory machine on the other, a new set of load monitoring and request re-assignment techniques have been developed and implemented. The current Convex machine contains a number of sub-complexes and the SWEB is extended and modified to perform load balancing between those sub-complexes. We have developed the SWEB sub-complex load monitor and the performance estimator and we have conducted experiments on file retrievals and wavelet transforms to demonstrate the effectiveness of the techniques developed. We have also developed a graphical test tool with a Java interface for evaluating the performance of the system under multiple requests, and a graphical interface for multi-resolution image browsing. This image browsing interface is well-developed and wil be integrated in to the Alexandria testbed system during the coming year.