DISK I O SCHEDULING AND COMMUNICATION I/O SCHEMES FOR MULTIMEDIA SERVER HYPERMS/

In step with the trend toward multimedia information services, NEC has developed the HYPERMS multimedia server that can provide/receive to/f rom users with multimedia information ''on-demand'' requests by means of their terminals. This paper discusses some new technological scheme s which have been proposed for multimedia data processing and realized in their design during the development. A multimedia server capable o f transmitting multimedia data such as video and audio information mus t be able to handle a large volume of such data very effectively and e fficiently. In a general multimedia server system, a large volume of d ata is read out through a disk I/O device and is transmitted by means of a communication I/O device. However, conventional devices of this t ype are not suitable for processing a large volume of the multimedia i nformation effectively and efficiently. In particular, there is a vita l technological drawback in scheduling scheme for conventional disk I/ O and in memory management scheme for communication I/O. The authors h ave studied the most appropriate form for the disk I/O scheduling sche me and a communication I/O scheme of a multimedia server. They have es tablished and would like to propose a new disk I/O scheduling scheme a nd the memory management scheme of a communication I/O which are optim al with regard to the operation of a multimedia server.