Flexible event-based threading for QoS-supporting middleware

Distributed computing platforms have made their way out of the research lab nowadays, yet support for some key application areas such as real time: in general and multimedia in particular is still found lacking. Since a single platform is unlikely to be able to satisfy the widely diverse requirements of such QoS-sensitive application domains, we propose a low-level foundation called COOL JAZZ instead, which is designed for easy customisation and on which more specific middleware platforms for distributed heterogeneous environments with QoS-requirements can be built. COOL JAZZ combines support for concurrency, communication, and signal handling within a unified event-based processing model inspired by SDL. In this paper we outline the overall architecture of COOL JAZZ and present the concurrency mechanisms in detail.