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An adaptive middleware for supporting time-critical event response

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Abstract

There are many applications where a timely response to an important event is needed. Often such response can require significant computation and possibly communication, and it can be very challenging to complete it within the time-frame the response is needed. At the same time, there could be application-specific flexibility in the computation that may be desired.

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a middleware that can support such applications. Each of the services in our target applications could have one or more service parameters, which can be modified, within the pre-specified ranges, by the middleware. The middleware enables the time-critical event handling to achieve the maximum benefit, as per the user-defined benefit function, while satisfying the time constraint. Our middleware is also based on the existing Grid infrastructure and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) concepts. We have evaluated our middleware and its support for adaptation using a volume rendering application and a Great Lake forecasting application. The evaluation shows that our adaptation is effective, and has a very low overhead.

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Correspondence to Qian Zhu.

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Zhu, Q., Agrawal, G. An adaptive middleware for supporting time-critical event response. Cluster Comput 12, 87–100 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-008-0071-x

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