Kaleido: A System for Dynamic Composition and Processing of Multimedia Flows

Emerging multimedia technologies have the potential to revolutionize the way humans organize, communicate and consume information [1,3,4,5,6,7,8]. However, the full benefits of this technology have yet to reach the vast majority of computer users. One reason for this is that high-bandwidth networks are not widely deployed or accessible. But beyond the bandwidth barrier, there also exists a multimedia computing barrier. The architectures of present day computers are not significantly different from their earlier generation counterparts: fundamentally oriented towards data processing -- they are simply much faster and better at it. Consequently, these systems (hardware and system software alike) are ill-equipped to cater to the special requirements imposed by multimedia. Most commonly used approach is to attach ‘multimedia’ devices such as cameras, sound-cards, CD-ROM drives as I/O peripherals to an existing computer system, and hope that a ‘fast enough’ CPU will run a few targeted applications reasonably well. It is possible, using this approach, to build some highly optimized (possibly through the use of custom hardware peripherals) stand alone multimedia applications that perform tolerably. However, such systems do not provide a general-purpose infra-structure to support the integration of multimedia capability into an arbitrary user application. To enable this, it is necessary to incorporate support for multimedia into the hardware and software fabric of the system, not just as ‘add-ons’. Kaleido is an experimental approach to designing such an integrated multimedia system. It is an on-going project and in this paper we present the current snap shot of our architecture and implementation.