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USITS 2001 Abstract
Modular and Efficient Resource Management in the Exedra Media Server
Stergios V. Anastasiadis, Kenneth C. Sevcik, and Michael Stumm, University of Toronto
Abstract
Explosive growth in online services has recently
renewed the interest for building modular and efficient network server
systems. System design complications coupled with excessive
expectations from technological progress previously discouraged the
development of media servers efficiently supporting video streams with
variable bit rates. In this paper, we describe the design of a
distributed media server architecture, and the implementation details
of a prototype. Native support is provided for variable bit rate
streams, by considering their special features in the resource
management policies. We identify several problems, and propose new
approaches for scheduling the playback requests, organizing the memory
buffers, allocating the storage space, and structuring the disk
metadata. We justify several of our decisions with comparative
performance measurements using both synthetic benchmarks and actual
experiments with variable bit rate MPEG-2 streams over SCSI disks.
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