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