A System for Parallel Media Processing
John A. Watlington and V. Michael Bove, Jr.
MIT Media Laboratory
Proc. Workshop on Parallel Processing and Multimedia, IEEE
International Parallel Processing Symposium, 1997, April 1997, (in
press).
We describe a parallel computer system for processing media: audio,
video, and graphics, among others. The system supports medium to
coarse grain parallelism, using a dataflow model of execution, on a
range of machine architectures scaling from a single von Neumann or
general purpose processor (GPP) up to networks of several hundred
heterogeneous processors. A distributed resource manager, extending
or
subsuming the functionality of a traditional operating system, is an
integral and necessary part of the system. While we are building a
system for processing a variety of media, in this paper we concentrate
on video because it provides an extreme case in terms of both data
rates and available parallelism.