9617271 Chalasani, Suresh Agrawal, Rajeev University of Wisconsin-Madison CISE Research Instrumentation: Application and Evaluation of a Low Cost Parallel Processing Platform This research instrumentation grant enables the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to purchase three 12-port Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switches and nine personal computers to support distinct research projects on real-time, multimedia and parallel computing applications. The following research projects will benefit from this instrumentation: - Traffic Management in ATM Networks - Parallel Computing on ATM Networks - Distributed Multi-media Computing on a Desktop ATM Network - Quality of Service Guarantees to Real-Time Message Streams For these applications, several traffic management strategies to provide quality of service guarantees will be evaluated using this equipment. These strategies combine mechanisms such as admission control, policing, scheduling, and feedback-based flow control. ATM-based networks of workstations may cause performance degradation for parallel applications, if different virtual circuits have unequal bandwidths. The research projects on parallel computing use the equipment to develop techniques for studying and alleviating this performance degradation in large parallel applications. For multimedia applications such as video conferencing, current video coding schemes often cause abrupt, frequent fluctuation of network traffic rendering inefficient use of network resources. A low cost video conferencing application will be developed to evaluate the effectiveness of present and emerging video coding algorithms. The equipment is crucial for investigating all aspects of competing strategies developed in the above research projects including performance, complexity, and ease of implementation. The results from the experimental validation will demonstrate whether or not ATM-based networks are viable platforms for su pporting diverse applications.
