A System for Parallel Media Processing

Abstract We describe a parallel computer system for processing media: audio,video, and graphics, among others. The system supports medium to coarse grain parallelism, using a dataflow model of execution, on a range of machine architectures scaling from a single von Neumann or general purpose processor (GPP) up to networks of several hundred heterogeneous processors. A distributed resource manager, extending or subsuming the functionality of a traditional operating system, is an integral and necessary part of the system. While we are building a system for processing a variety of media, in this paper we concentrate on video because it provides an extreme case in terms of both data rates and available parallelism.

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