The diversity of computers and networks and networks within a distributed system makes these systems highly heterogeneos. System heterogeneity complicates the design of static applications that must meet quality-of-service requirements. As part of th ERDoS sup 2 project, we have introduced a novel concept of dynamic application strcturing where the system, at run time, chooses the best end-to-end implementation of an application, based on the system and resource attributes. Not only does this approach improve resource utilization and increase the total benefit to the user over that provided by the current static approaches, but it also is transparent to users and simplifies application development. We describe the models and mechanisms necessary for dynamic application structuring and use a set of multimedia applications to illustrate dynamic application structuring.
展开▼
