Thursday, May 31, 2007

MS's new desktop

Just checked the advertisement of MS surface. Its cool. That's what a group of HCI folks are investigating on. Will it become the future standard equipment in luxury hotels, stores, or office?



Tuesday, May 15, 2007

HPCS2007 poster: Towards an HTTP-based Service Platform with High Scalability

This year, HPCS comes to Saskatoon, and I submitted a poster titled "Towards an HTTP-based Service Platform with High Scalability". The abstract is the following.

HTTP is a message transportation method used by the majority of so-called web services or services on the web, which are implemented by using SOAP or POX/JSON. The application of Ajax has dramatically increased the load on service platforms by long-lived connection and frequent polling. For most multithreading platforms implementing thread-per-request policy, this raises scalability problems for threads since the performance of each thread will be degraded when the total number of threads increases. Service orchestrations can also introduce thread scalability problems when they have long lifetime and involve message exchanges with multiple high-latency partner services.

This poster discusses the issues for an HTTP-based service platform to achieve high scalability. We compare the options for platform implementation of IO, thread pool, asynchrony, and continuation, and propose a design for highly scalable platform for both atomic services and service orchestrations.