This chapter serves two purposes. First, it provides a concrete
example for building a simple, yet fully functional Scout appliance.
The appliance presented is a network-attached TV that can display MPEG
encoded video [54, 67].
Second, this chapter demonstrates path-derived resource management
benefits. To emphasize resource management---as opposed to the
path-code related benefits described in the previous chapter---it is
best to choose an appliance that spends most of its CPU time in just
one or a few modules. To this end, MPEG decoding is ideal. This
compression algorithm is capable of reducing the size of a video by a
factor of 10 to 100 and with this high compression ratio comes a
relatively expensive decompression algorithm. Workstations have only
recently become fast enough to perform MPEG decoding in realtime. For
example, on a first generation Alpha, it is not atypical that
displaying a single video uses up all available CPU time---ninety
percent or more of which is spent in the MPEG decoder. This means
that code-path overhead such as cross-module call overhead or
extraneous operations due to abstraction boundaries are irrelevant for
all practical purposes. On the other hand, proper resource
management, such as CPU scheduling or buffer management, is crucial
when multiple loads are put on the system simultaneously.
5.1 Building NetTV
5.2 Resource Management