Parallel Interactive Media Server Systems

Abstract

Interactive media server systems play an important role in the envisioned ‘Information society’. Powerful media server systems are one of the cornerstones of the networked society in which media servers store news information, product descriptions, customer information, video clips and many other media elements that are used to inform consumers, run businesses, or entertain people.

Within this paper we distinguish two types of media objects. Realtime media on the one hand and non-realtime media objects on the other hand. Whereas realtime media, e.g. audio and video streams, are mainly used in information and entertainment applications, non-realtime media is used in all general purpose applications, e.g. conventional web services. The paper presents the design of two media server systems, handling one of the two types of media objects each. The server systems described in the paper are both based on a distributed memory parallel computer system. For each of the server systems presented here, a single important question is studied in detail. This is the data layout question for non-realtime media servers and the communication scheduling problem for realtime media servers.

This work was partly supported by the MWF Project “Die Virtuelle Wissensfabrik”, the EU project SICMA, and the DFG Sonderforschungsbereich 1511 “Massive Par-allelitÄt: Algorithmen, Entwurfsmethoden, Anwendungen”.