Extremely Distributed Media Processing
William Butera, V. Michael Bove, Jr., and James McBride
MIT Media Laboratory
Proc. SPIE Media Processors 2002 v. 4674, 2002.
The Object-Based Media Group at the MIT Media Laboratory is developing
robust, self-organizing programming models for dense ensembles of
ultra-miniaturized computing nodes which are deployed by the thousands
in bulk fashion, e.g. embedded into building materials. While such
systems potentially offer almost unlimited computation for multimedia
purposes, the individual devices contain tiny amounts of memory, lack
explicit addresses, have wireless communication ranges only in the
range of millimeters to centimeters, and are expected to fail at high
rates. An unorthodox approach to handling of multimedia data is
required in order to achieve useful, reliable work in such an
environment. We describe the hardware and software strategies, and
demonstrate several examples showing the processing of images and
sound in such a system.