Object Placement in Parallel Hypermedia Systems
Shahram Ghandeharizadeh, Luis Ramos, Zubair Asad, Waheed Qureshi · 1991
During the past few years, hypermedia systems have emerged as an essential component of many application domains ranging from software engineering to library information systems. This is primarily due to the capability of these systems to manage and represent irregularly structured information, and to provide a userfriendly interface for information retrieval by providing a browsing capability. However, most stand-alone implementation of these systems (based on a workstation) cannot support a “real-time ” display of audio and video objects. This is due to the low I/O bandwidth of the current disk technology and the large size of these objects which requires them to be almost always disk resident. With the predicted size and bandwidth requirements of future multi-media objects, this limitation must be resolved if hypermedia systems are to be the wave of future. This paper describes a placement strategy for the objects of a parallel hypermedia system. The objectives of this strategy are to support a “real-time ” display of media objects and to maximize the through-put of the system by uniformly distributing its workload across the processors. In addition, we describe a prefetching mechanism to reduce the response time of the system. Finally, we evaluate our object placement algorithm and its distribution the processors. 1