Integrated Processors Scheduling for Multimedia

The advent of multimedia ushers forth a growing class of applications that must manipulate digital audio and video within well-defined timeliness requirements. Existing processor schedulers are inadequate in supporting these requirements. They fail to allow the integration of these continuous media computations with conventional interactive and batch activities. By observing that all tasks do in fact have timeliness requirements, we have created a new scheduler that provides integrated processor allocation for all classes of computational activities. By exploiting information on the relative importance of different activities to the user, the scheduler seeks to maximize the value the system delivers to the user, and gracefully degrades activities in order of importance when all timeliness requirements can not be met. The solution is unique in the degree to which it allows users control over the allocation of processing resources, and in that it provides an integrated scheduling solution in supporting multimedia applications.