| Many computing applications demonstrate increasingly voracious appetites, consuming ever more resources. When high performance applications are required to share networks, computers, and disks with other applications, their performance suffers. When the resources cannot be increased, applications must either adapt or the resources must guarantee better performance to some applications. This latter solution is known as quality of service, or QoS.; This dissertation presents the design and implementation of an architecture to provide end-to-end QoS for high-end applications—those applications consuming a variety of resources and expecting high-performance. End-to-end QoS involves not only traditional network QoS, but other types of QoS, such as CPU and disk, to ensure that the application receives the performance it needs. The major contribution of this work is the design of an innovative and extensible architecture which provides uniform access to different types of QoS. |
