This thesis presents a modular, general-purpose interconnection network simulator called NETSIM developed as an extension to YACSIM, a C-language based process-oriented discrete event simulator. NETSIM is capable of simulating a wide range of switch architectures and network topologies. A NETSIM model can be simulated in a stand-alone mode with the ...

We demonstrate the profound effects of contention on the performance of page-based software distributed shared memory systems, as such systems are scaled to a larger number of nodes. Programs whose performance scales will experience only minor increases in memory latency, do not suffer from contention, and show a balanced communication load. In ...

To satisfy the quality of service requirements of real-time multimedia applications, networks must employ resource reservation and admission control. In this paper, we describe a new Measurement-Based Admission Control (MBAC) algorithm that uses empirical traffic envelopes of the aggregate traffic flow to allocate network resources. Our framework of ...

Software Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) provides a shared-memory abstraction on distributed memory hardware, making a parallel programmer's task easier. Unfortunately, software DSM is less efficient than the direct use of the underlying message-passing hardware. The chief reason for this is that hand-coded and compiler-generated message-passing ...

This thesis describes a method to simulate parallel programs written for shared memory multiprocessors. We have extended execution-driven simulation to facilitate the simulation of shared memory. We have developed a shared memory profiler, which, at compile-time, inserts simulation support code into the assembly code of the program to be able to ...

Hierarchical path planning techniques for Intelligent Autonomous Mobile Robots (IAMRs) attempt to subdivide the overall task of path planning into several layers. This subdivision is made more difficult by the physical robot's computational architecture. The most important problem with classic hierarchies is their inability to cope with a diversity ...

This thesis proposes new algorithms for image transmissions over wireless communication channels. The wireless image transmission is the first step in offering multimedia services over current wireless cellular networks. It is also a challenging problem because a wireless channel usually has a very high bit error rate and sometimes severe fading. The ...

Programming robots is a difficult task, especially for autonomous robots that must operate in an open, unstructured environment. A programmer building such a system should have a number of sophisticated tools at his/her disposal. In this thesis, we provide the basic framework for the development of a programming language that can be used to program ...

Programmers often rely on performance analysis tools to provide feedback about the execution of their applications. However, the nature of this feedback is far from satisfactory. Often the feedback is purely descriptive and at a very low-level, making it difficult for the programmer to rectify performance problems. This dissertation demonstrates a ...

This dissertation describes the implementation and evaluation of operating system design techniques that can be used to achieve scalability and to improve performance in large-scale shared memory multiprocessors with non-uniform memory hierarchies. We describe the implementation of SALSA, an operating system that incorporates these techniques and ...