Abstract: Systems and methods for managing the processing of the same pieces of information, e.g., messages, by multiple consumers, in a prescribed order, without causing the degradation of any consumer's performance because of other consumers' access to the same information. A single information queue contains pieces of information to be accessed by multiple consumers. Each piece of information is stored in the information queue along with an information identifier that uniquely identifies the piece of information. A separate table is used to keep track of and identify the pieces of information in the information queue that have been accessed by respective consumers. This separate table is decoupled from the information queue, and, thus, each consumer's access of a piece of queued information does not impact any other consumer's access of the same piece of information.

Abstract: According to an approach for propagating messages in a distributed computer system, message information is identified that needs to be sent to a destination site. After the message information is identified, the message information is assigned a propagation sequence number that identifies when the message information is sent to the destination site relative to other message information sent from the source site to the destination site. A message that is based on the message information is then transmitted to the destination site. The transmitted message includes the sequence number value and a source ID that identifies the source site as transmitting the message to the destination site. After the message is received at the destination site, the propagation sequence number that was assigned to the message information may be stored in nonvolatile memory at the destination site.

Abstract: A computer system executes an application that requires transfer of data to or from the computer system. The system responds to requests from the application, by allocating storage for a data buffer, verifying that the application is authorized to access the buffer, converting an address of the buffer utilized by the application to a corresponding system address and mapping the system buffer address to an index. The system also responds to a subsequent transmit or receive request from the application, by accessing the data buffer based on the index such that no storage allocation, address conversion, or access verification is required for the transmit or receive request after the transmit or receive request is made. The computer system includes a communications adapter at an input or output port and the data is transferred between the communications adapter and the buffer without any intermediary buffering. Thus, the transmit and receive requests are processed expeditiously.

Abstract: A data storage system includes a mass storage unit storing a data entity, such as a digital representation of a video presentation, that is partitioned into a plurality N of temporally-ordered segments. A data buffer is bidirectionally coupled to the mass storage unit for storing up to M of the temporally-ordered segments, wherein M is less than N. The data buffer has an output for outputting stored ones of the temporally-ordered segments. The data storage system further includes a data buffer manager for scheduling transfers of individual ones of the temporally-ordered segments between the mass storage unit and the data buffer. The data buffer manager schedules the transfers in accordance with at least a predicted time that an individual one of the temporally-ordered segments will be required to be output from the data buffer.