Seminar by Manoj Kumar
Delivering video on internet -- High performance specialized servers
Manoj Kumar
IBM Software Group
Date: Friday, July 23, 2010
Time: 4:00 PM
Venue: CS102.Abstract:
Advances in networking infrastructure and handheld devices, 3G networks and iPod's, have made video an integral component of internet applications in the new millennium. The servers that deliver the video on the network to the end users represent a significant cost of the overall application.
In this talk I will describe a video delivery system that offers lower cost and higher capacity than the traditional alternative of using general purpose computers and RAID for video delivery. The key elements of the design are new data formats for storing the video data in memory and disk subsystems, preprocessing of computations needed for video delivery that are common across all streams, and synchronization of video delivery operations across all streams to avoid interference on system resources.
I will also describe two design points for video servers designed on the above architectural concept. First one, targeted for video streams with very large number of concurrent accesses, relies on coupling semiconductor storage to a network switch. The second one focuses on video corpora of larger sizes where disk storage offers a more compelling price point than the semiconductor memory alternative at acceptable performance. Performance data from actual implementation of the second design point will be discussed briefly.