Adaptive QoS support for distributed, Java-based applications

Describes SRI International's ERDoS (End-to-end Resource management of Distributed Systems) project. ERDoS is a distributed middleware with comprehensive resource management support, including application scheduling, resource allocation and graceful adaptation. We discuss how we have implemented this resource management as part of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). We have also provided a resource management application programming interface (API) as a new Java class library. The ERDoS development environment enables nonprogrammers to create complex distributed applications by simply stringing together multiple Java methods. The ERDoS runtime environment utilizes a structuring algorithm to create a distributed Java application dynamically, and then provides allocation, scheduling and content-based, graceful, adaptive QoS support to these applications. We demonstrate the benefits of content-based adaptation and of dynamic structuring of distributed applications, using a set of video applications.