Abstract-Band - Fakultät für Informatik, TU Wien - Technische ...

Arbeitsbereich Programmiersprachen und Übersetzer
Tim Blechmann
Supernova - A Multiprocessor Aware Real-Time Audio Synthesis Engine For
SuperCollider
Studium: Individuelles Masterstudium aus Medieninformatik
Betreuer: Ao.Univ.Prof. Dr. Martin Ertl
These days, most computer systems are built with multi-core processors.
However, most computer music systems use a single-threaded synthesis
engine. While the single-core performance for current CPUs is sufficient for
many computer music applications, some demanding applications benefit
from using multiple processors simultaneously. Real-time audio synthesis
imposes specific constraints regarding real-time safety, since the synthesis
engine needs to be tuned for worst-case latencies below one millisecond. As
a result, no blocking synchronization can be used and the signal processing
graph needs to be split into reasonably sized parts, that provide enough
parallelism without introducing a significant scheduling overhead. During the
work on this master thesis, I developed Supernova as a multiprocessor aware
synthesis engine for SuperCollider. SuperCollider is a computer music system
based on a dynamic scripting language with a real-time garbage collector,
that is used to control a separate audio synthesis server. Supernova replaces
the original audio synthesis engine. It is not possible to automatically
parallelize the synthesis graph of SuperCollider without fundamentally
changing the semantics of the SuperCollider class library. Therefore a the
programming model for the synthesis graph was extended, exposing
parallelism explicitly to the user. To achieve this, I propose two simple
concepts, `parallel groups' and `satellite nodes'.
Tobias Dönz
Design and Implementation of the next Generation XVSM Framework:
Runtime, Protocol and API
Studium: Masterstudium Software Engineering & Internet Computing
Betreuerin: Ao.Univ.Prof. Dr. Eva Kühn
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The development of software for distributed systems is often carried out with
middleware that provides programming abstractions to ease the
implementation. Space-based middleware systems are based on tuple spaces
and allow loosely coupled components of a distributed system to coordinate
over a shared data store. They provide synchronization, time and space
decoupling. However, tuple spaces offer no order for the stored data objects
which limits the coordination capabilities. eXtensible Virtual Shared Memory
(XVSM) is a space-based middleware architecture that allows for more and
flexible coordination and can be easily extended. Recently, it has been
specified with a formal model in several layers, of which the lower ones have