A Multicore Operating System with QoS Guarantees for Network Audio Applications

Efforts to create low-latency protocols to ensure quality of service (QoS) for audio networks often ignore the importance of the operating system (OS) in the computers at the ends of the network chain. An experimental OS called Tesselation, developed in the Parallel Computing Laboratory at UC Berkeley, was tailored to multicore processors with such features as guaranteed resource allocation and customizable user-level runtimes. To demonstrate performance isolation and service guarantees, the authors tested Tessellation under various conditions using a resource-demanding network application. This OS enables network audio applications to meet their time requirements.