Disk scheduling in a multimedia I/O system
MULTIMEDIA '93 Proceedings of the first ACM international conference on Multimedia
I/O issues in a multimedia system
Computer
Design of a large scale multimedia storage server
JENC5 Selected papers of the annual conference on Internet Society/5th joint European networking conference
Parallel programming with MPI
Dynamic, Object-Oriented Parallel Processing
IEEE Parallel & Distributed Technology: Systems & Technology
Parallelizing I/O-Intensive Image Access and Processing Applications
IEEE Concurrency
Parallel Video Servers: A Tutorial
IEEE MultiMedia
Performances of the PS2 Parallel Storage and Processing System for Tomographic Image
ICPADS '97 Proceedings of the 1997 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems
Computer-Assisted Generation of PVM/C++ Programs Using CAP
EuroPVM '96 Proceedings of the Third European PVM Conference on Parallel Virtual Machine
A Framework for the Storage and Retrieval of Continuous Media Data
ICMCS '95 Proceedings of the International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems
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Parallel servers for I/O and compute intensive continuous media applications are difficult to develop. A server application comprises many threads located in different address spaces as well as files striped over multiple disks located on different computers. The present contribution describes the construction of a continuous media server, the 4D beating heart slice server, based on a computer-aided parallelization tool (CAP) and on a library of parallel file system components enabling the combination of pipelined parallel disk access and processing operations. Thanks to CAP, the presented architecture is concisely described as a set of threads, operations located within the threads and flow of data and parameters (tokens) between operations. Continuous media applications are supported by allowing tokens to be suspended during a period of time specified by a user-defined function. Our target application, the 4D beating heart server supports the extraction of freely oriented slices from a 4D beating heart volume (one 3D volume per time sample). This server application requires both a high I/O throughput for accessing from disks the set of 4D sub-volumes (extents) intersecting the desired slices and a large amount of processing power to extract these slices and to resample them into the display grid. With a server configuration of 3 PCs and 24 disks, up to 7.3 slices can be delivered per second, i.e. 43 MB/s are continuously read from disks and 4.1 MB/s of slice parts are extracted, transfered to the client, merged, buffered and displayed. This performance is close to the maximal performance deliverable by the underlying hardware. The observed single stream server delay jitter varies between 0.6s (52% of maximal display rate) and 1.4s (92% of the maximal display rate). For the same resource utilization, the jitter is proportional to the number of streams that are accessed synchronously. The presented 4D beating heart application suggests that powerful continuous media server applications can be built on top of a set of simple PCs connected to SCSI disks.