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.
CV:
Reinhard Lueling obtained his diploma (MSc.) in Computer Science at the University of Paderborn in 1988. Since that time he worked in various areas of parallel and distributed computing as a research assistant within the group of Prof. Dr. B. Monien. A major interest is the architecture and efficient use of parallel and distributed computing systems. Results of this work were used for the design of parallel and distributed computing systems manufactured by Parsytec Computer. Within the area of parallel algorithms Reinhard Lueling worked on the design and evaluation of parallel loadbalancing strategies as well as on the integration of these algorithms into various practical applications. After finishing his Ph.D. at University of Paderborn on load balancing in 1996, Reinhard Lueling put effort on the implementation of high performance media server systems for the delivery of continuous media streams. This work was mainly carried out in national and European research and development projects.