9421978 Singh This award is to purchase an ATM network which will be used for several research projects: design of a platform for evaluating shared memories and coherence protocols, networking research, image databases, and high performance transaction processing. The proposed research on distributed shared memories will extend an existing simulation and evaluation platform by providing efficient interfaces, implementation of objects, fault tolerance, and simulation using semantic information. The networking research will deal with a number of critical issues in ATM network design, modeling, and applications: traffic shaping, heterogeneous traffic modeling and measurement, the delivery of IP traffic over ATM, and the design and construction of native-mode ATM protocol stacks to support multimedia applications. The project on image databases will explore efficient content-based image retrieval mechanisms with the help of dynamic and adaptive index structures. The overall goal is to support efficient similarity queries as well as to develop fast browsing techniques. Finally, the proposed research on high performance transaction processing will implement and study the performance of a shared nothing system using weak memories and data partitioning techniques. ***
