The Stampede Programming System


Stampede was developed by Kishore Ramachandran jointly with researchers from Compaq CRL (formerly DEC CRL) as a cluster parallel programming system for interactive multimedia applications. Emerging application domains such as interactive vision and animation require the efficient management of "temporally evolving" data, which often translates to providing "soft real time" guarantees for such applications. Stampede system provides a higher level data abstraction called Space-time Memory which is well-suited to providing the common parallel programming requirements found in most interactive applications, namely, buffer management, inter-task synchronization, and meeting real-time constraints. Other features of Stampede include cluster-wide threads and consistent distributed shared objects. Stampede was originally implemented on a cluster of Alpha SMPs (on Digital Unix) interconnected by Memory Channel. Since then it has been ported to run on x86-Linux, x86-Solaris, and x86-NT platforms.

Stampede semantics has now been extended to allow distributed programming spanning end devices (such as sensors) to back end clusters. The end devices (clients) can run Stampede threads that are written in Java or C. D-Stampede is the name of this distributed programming system. To get a good feel for the computational abstractions that are available in the Stampede system please read the paper Space-time Memory.

Click here for an abstract of a talk to be presented at ASPLOS-8, "wild and crazy ideas session", October 6, 1998, San Jose, Ca.

Stampede Overview Presentation

Publications Related to Stampede


Return to Kishore's Homepage