System support for time-critical applications

Abstract

A number of interesting application areas have time constraints associated with them — most notably in the area of multimedia. Today’s workstations do not provide adequate support for applications whose definition of correctness is a function of time. This paper presents a set of system-level mechanisms that permit the incorporation of multiple streams of sustained, high-bandwidth, time-critical information as first-class data types within a distributed workstation computing environment. This work is being done as a part of a broader research effort being conducted at Sun Microsystems Laboratories to develop fundamental system technology in support of multimedia applications.