Performances of Multiprocessor Multidisk Architectures for Continuous Media Storage

B.A. Gennart, V. Messerli, R.D. Hersch

In Proc. Storage and Retrieval for Still Image and Video Databases IV, 1-2 February 1996, San Jose, USA, SPIE Proc. 2670, 286-299

Multimedia interfaces increase the need for large image databases, capable of storing and reading streams of data with strict synchronicity and isochronicity requirements. In order to fulfill these requirements, we consider a parallel image server architecture which relies on arrays of intelligent disk nodes, each disk node being composed of one processor and one or more disks. This contribution analyzes through bottleneck performance evaluation and simulation the behavior of two multi-processor multi-disk architectures~: a point-to-point architecture and a shared-bus architecture similar to current multiprocessor workstation architectures. We compare the two architectures on the basis of two multimedia algorithms~: the compute-bound frame resizing by resampling and the data-bound disk-to-client stream transfer. The results suggest that the shared bus is a potential bottleneck despite its very high hardware throughput (400Mbytes/s) and that an architecture with addressable local memories located closely to their respective processors could partially remove this bottleneck. The point-to-point architecture is scalable and able to sustain high throughputs for simultaneous compute-bound and data-bound operations.

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