On multimedia repositories, personal computers, and hierarchical storage systems

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of personal computers at homes, businesses, classrooms, libraries, etc. Most often, these systems are used to disseminate information. Recently, multimedia repositories have added to the excitement of this information age by allowing a user to retrieve and manipulate continuous media data types (audio and video objects). The design and implementation of these systems is challenging due to both the large size of objects that constitute this media type and their continuous bandwidth requirement. Compression in combination with the availability of fast CPUs (for real-Time decompression) provide effective support for a continuous display of those objects with a high bandwidth requirement. Hierarchical storage structures (consisting of RAM. disk and tertiary storage devices) provide a cost-effective solution for the large size of their repositories. The focus of this study is on personal computers (single user, single display) that employ fast CPUs, compression, and hierarchical storage structures to support multimedia applications. Its goals are to ensure a continuous display of audio and video objects while minimizing the latency time observed by the user. Its contributions include a novel pipelining mechanism and PIRATE as a technique to manage the disk resident objects.