Challenges and Approach

 

false Before launching into what is principally a technical discussion, this chapter paints the background to our research in broad strokes. It outlines recent developments in computer architectures and points out negative ramifications for a class of popular applications that includes multimedia and networking (2.1Application Domain). It argues that automatic optimization of task pipelines can likely resolve these problems (2.2Approach) and positions that approach within its broader research domain (2.3Related Work). To understand how throughput of network and media applications can be increased, we examine their structure (2.1Application Domain) and identify common bottlenecks (2.1.1Opportunities), then propose an optimization approach, application tailoring, that can consistently avoid bottlenecks across ranges of applications and computer systems and apply that to Unix pipelines in Streamline (2.2Approach). I/O optimization has considerable research to which we offset this work (2.3Related Work).