Design of a Scalable Multimedia Storage Manager (original) (raw)
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On multimedia repositories, personal computers, and hierarchical storage systems
Proceedings of the second ACM international conference on Multimedia - MULTIMEDIA '94, 1994
The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of personal computers at homes, businesses, cl-rooms, libraries, etc. Most often, thene systems are used to disseminate information. Recently, multimedia repositories have added to the excitement of this information age by allowing a user to retrieve and manipulate continuous media data types (audio and video objects). The design and implementation of these systems is challenging due to both the large size of objects that constitute this media type and their continuous bandwidth requirement. Compression in combination with the availability of fast CPUS (for real-time decompression) pro vide effective support for a continuous display of those ob jects with a high bandwidth requirement. Hierarchical storage structures (consisting of RAM, disk and tertiary storage devices) provide a cost-effective solution for the large size of their repositories. The focus of this study is on personal computers (single user, single display) that employ fast CPUS, compression, and hierarchical storage structures to support multimedia applications. Its goals are to ensure a continuous display of audio and video objects while minimizing the latency time observed by the user. Its contributions include a novel pipelining mechanism and PIRATE as a technique to manage the disk resident objects.
Storage Systems Support for Multimedia Applications
2000
Lately, on-demand streaming multimedia applications have become very popular. Contemporary personal computers can handle the load imposed by such multimedia applications on the client side, but the potentially high number of concurrent users accessing a server represents a generic problem. The multimedia storage system is responsible for storage and retrieval of multimedia data from storage devices, and plays a vital role for the performance and scalability of multimedia servers. It deals with issues related to data placement, scheduling, file management, continuous data delivery, buffer management, prefetching, etc., and with the particular demands of multimedia applications, such as real-time characteristics, large file sizes, high data rates, and several data sources. Performing these tasks and supporting these requirements appropriately are burdened by an increasing speed mismatch between processors and the most prolific and affordable storage devices, -magnetic disks -, and by the introduction of new requirements in new multimedia scenarios.
1997
Due to the fact that the speeds of secondary storage devices have not improved relative to other computing technologies, a lot of efforts have been devoted to intelligent and efficient ways of storing data of storing data to maximixe the bandwidth of a computing system. Many of those techniques have proven useful; however, with the advent of multimedia and its enormous real-time and size requirements, the problems of data allocation and retrieval have become even more crucial. In [1][2], we describe some designs of efficient multimedia object storage strategies that strive to allocate multimedia objects with the objective of satisfying their real-time retrieval requirements. We utilize some fragmentation strategies, a cost function, and bipartite graph model to allocate multimedia data efficiently. In the development of the storage allocation strategies, some assumptions were made about the functionalities and capabilities of the controlling Multimedia Object Manager. Here, we describe...
Design and implementation of scalable continuous media servers
Parallel Computing, 1998
During the past decade, the information technology has evolved to store and retrieve continuous media data types, e.g., audio and video clips. Unlike the traditional data types (e.g., text), continuous media consists of a sequence of quanta, either audio samples or video frames, that convey meaning when presented at a pre-specified rate. A challenging task when implementing these servers is to guarantee retrieval and delivery of a clip at its pre-specified rate. Continuous media servers are expected to play a major role in many application domains including library information systems, entertainment technology, educational applications, etc. The focus of this study is on the disk subsystem of a server and techniques that both enhance its performance and ensure its scalability. By scalable, we mean that the system can grow incrementally as the requirements of an application grows in order to avoid a degradation in performance. This study details data placement techniques across both (1) the zones of a disk in order to trade bandwidth for storage, and (2) multiple disks to enable the system to scale. In addition, we describe scheduling techniques to (I) trade memory for disk bandwidth and vice versa, and (2) merge multiple requests referencing a single clip in order to increase the number of simultaneous displays supported by the system. We present performance results from Mitra, an experimental prototype that realizes an implementation of the presented techniques. These results demonstrate the feasibility of a scalable server. 0 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.
An overview of techniques to support continuous retrieval of multimedia objects
ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News, 1993
Multimedia information systems have emerged as an essential component of many application domains ranging from library information systems to entertainment technology. However, most implementations of these systems (based on a workstation) cannot support a continuous display of multimedia objects and suffer from frequent disruptions and delays termed hiccups . This is due to the low I/O bandwidth of the current disk technology, the high bandwidth requirement of multimedia objects, and the large size of these objects which requires them to be almost always disk resident. One approach to resolve this limitation is to decluster a multimedia object across multiple disk drives in order to employ the aggregate bandwidth of several disks to support its continuous retrieval (and display). To support simultaneous display of several multimedia objects for different users, the system can replicate data across multiple groups of disk drives in a virtual manner. This paper provides an overview o...
An implicitly scalable, fully interactive multimedia storage server
Proceedings. 2nd International Workshop on Distributed Interactive Simulation and Real-Time Applications (Cat. No.98EX191), 1998
We are developing a next generation multimedia server that will provide the foundation for fully interactive access to tremendous amounts and varieties of both real-time and non real-time multimedia data by hundreds of simultaneous clients. Current multimedia servers are inadequate for this task given their limitations of supporting only basic multimedia data types, inherently non-interactive access semantics and intrinsic scaling limitations. Our solution abandons the common use of striping and object replication and implements a random data allocation scheme across a cluster of commodity computers. This scheme provides for load balancing both within and among storage nodes of the cluster while supporting virtually any multimedia data type. This paper presents the essential background, design and implementation, and simulation studies of our system. Our results show that we can guarantee with high probability that an arbitrary I/O requests can be satisfied within a small delay bound while obtaining high system utilization. Although our specific application is a real-time multimedia storage server, principles developed here can be applied to real-time distributed scheduling systems in general. *
Improving the I/O performance of intermediate multimedia storage nodes
Multimedia Systems, 2003
The data retrieval operations in servers and proxies for Media-on-Demand applications represent a severe bottleneck, because a potentially (very) high number of users concurrently retrieve data with high data rates. In the Intermediate Storage Node Concept (INSTANCE) project, we have developed a new architecture for Media-on-Demand storage nodes that maximizes the number of concurrent clients a single node can support. We avoid the traditional bottlenecks, like copy operations, multiple copies of the same data element in main memory, and checksum calculation in communication protocols, by designing, implementing, and tightly integrating three orthogonal techniques: a zero-copy-one-copy memory architecture, network level framing, and integrated error management. In this paper, we describe the INSTANCE storage node, and present an evaluation of our mechanisms. Our experimental performance results show that the integration of these three techniques in NetBSD at least doubles the number of concurrent clients that a single storage node can serve in our testbed.
The design and implementation of a multimedia storage server to support video-on-demand applications
Proceedings of EUROMICRO 96. 22nd Euromicro Conference. Beyond 2000: Hardware and Software Design Strategies, 1995
In this paper we present the design and implementation of a clienthewer based multimedia architecture for supporting video-on-demand applications. We describe in detail the software architecture of the implementation along with the adopted buffering mechanism. The proposed multithreaded architecture obtains, on one hand, a high degree of parallelism at the server side, allowing both the disk controller and the network card controller work in parallel, On the other hand, at the client side, it achieves the synchronized playback of the video stream at its precise rate, decoupling this process from the reception of data through the network. Additionally, we have derived, under an engineering perspective, some services that a real-time operating system should offer to satisfy the requirements found in video-on-demand applications.
A parallel disk storage system for real-time multimedia applications
International Journal of Intelligent Systems, 1998
We describe the design and implementation of the RIO (Randomized I/O) multimedia object server which manages a set of parallel disks and supports real-time throughput and statistical delay guarantees. This storage subsystem was implemented as part of a multimedia information server which supports multiple concurrent applications such as video on demand and 3D interactive virtual worlds. We discuss the principal issues and innovations involved in the design and implementation of the RIO storage system, and present experimental performance results measured on a prototype implementation.