D-Stampede: Distributed Programming System for Ubiquitous Computing

Abstract

That the future of information technology will be dominated by invisible or pervasive computing is a belief that is being shared by several research groups. In a sense, this is the limit of the ubiquitous computing vision that was proposed by Mark Weiser in his 1991 Scientific American article on "The Computer for the 21st Century." The hardware advances, falling price of computing and communication gear, and the presence of technology in several aspects of our everyday life is giving credence to this vision. We focus on an important problem in this space, namely, distributed programming support for an assemblage of interconnected hetergeneous computing elements that make up such an environment. We address the interactive, dynamic, and stream-oriented nature of this appliation class and develop appropriate computational abstractions in the D-Stampede distributed programming system. The key features of D-Stampede include indexing data streams temporally, correlating different data streams temporally, performing automatic distributed garbage collection of unnecessary stream data, supporting high performance by exploiting hardware parallelism where available, supporting platform and language heterogeneity, and dealing with application level dynamism. D-Stampede is currently in use at Georgia Tech for developing instances of ubiquitous computing applicaitons. We discuss the features of D-Stampede, the programming ease it affords and its performance at a micro-elvel and at the level of a protypical application.