Self-Modifying and Self-Adapting Operating Systems
Margo Seltzer from Harvard University presented a paper about how the VINO operating system will use self-monitoring to collect data about the operating system's performance. Both on-line and off-line of this data are used to determine how the system might be modified to optimize its performance.
Extended Discussion
Slides
A Fresh Look at Memory Hierarchy Management
In his paper, John Chapin of MIT observed that current schedulers have two major drawbacks in the desktop computing environment. First, they optimize for throughput, rather than for the performance of the tasks that are most critical to the user. Second, although they do a good job of prioritizing processor allocation, when memory is tight the performance of high-priority applications often suffers. To address these shortcomings, John proposed the use of a new performance metric, system memory cycles per instruction (system MCPI) to evaluate the success of operating system improvements.
The Role of Trace Modulation in Building Mobile Computing Systems
Brian Noble from CMU outlined some of the reasons that it is difficult to perform rigorous, reproducible experiments on wireless networking systems. He also described the use of trace-modulation to emulate the performance characteristics of a target network. Trace-modulation allows both synthetically generated and empirically collected traces to be combined into a "hybrid" trace in which the simulator selects a particular trace based on data from a "location simulator." The resulting system provides flexibility in the types of environment to be simulated, and realistic simulation.
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