A SYSTEM FOR PARALLEL MEDIA PROCESSING

We describe a parallel computer system for processing media: audio,vid eo, and graphics, among others. The system supports medium to coarse g rain parallelism, using a dataflow model of execution, on a range of m achine architectures scaling from a single von Neumann or general purp ose processor (GPP) up to networks of several hundred heterogeneous pr ocessors. A distributed resource manager, extending or subsuming the f unctionality of a traditional operating system, is an integral and nec essary part of the system. While we are building a system for processi ng a variety of media, in this paper we concentrate on video because i t provides an extreme case in terms of both data rates and available p arallelism. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.