Topical Coverage of the Course

The reading list for this course will cover application areas for large-scale media services, system architecture issues for providing such services, and case studies of systems built in industries. I hope to have visitors from industries through the quarter to talk about their experiences related to the topical coverage of this course.

Applications
- web servers
- multi-media indexing
- video on demand
- enhanced video conferencing
- interactive non-linear editing
  - TV news and programs production
  - movie editing (e.g. Toy Story)
- digital libraries
- Classroom 2000
System architecture
- parallel server architecture
  - sources of parallelism
- media oriented storage systems
  - I/O organization (disks and tape libraries)
  - file systems
- real-time resource management
  - media synchronization
  - adaptive scheduling
- memory hierarchy
  - replication and caching in a parallel cluster server
  - garbage collection
  - migration between levels of storage hierarchy
- distribution
  - naming issues
  - load balancing
- high availability
  - failure handling
  - continuous operation
Case studies
- SGI Mediabases
- Avid
- IBM
- MediaVista (DEC)
- GTE
- RealMedia