Efficient data layout, scheduling and playout control in MARS

Abstract.

Large-scale on-demand multimedia servers that can provide independent and interactive access to a vast amount of multimedia information to a large number of concurrent clients will be required for a widespread deployment of exciting multimedia applications. Our project, called Massively-parallel And Real-time Storage (MARS) is aimed at prototype development of such a large-scale server. This paper primarily focuses on the distributed data layout and scheduling techniques developed as a part of this project. These techniques support a high degree of parallelism and concurrency, and efficiently implement various playout control operations, such as fast forward, rewind, pause, resume, frame advance and random access.