MITRA A CONTINUOUS MEDIA SERVER USC Database Lab

The research activities at the USC Database Lab during the past three years have resulted in the design and implementation of Mitra. Mitra is a scalable continuous media server that is operational on a cluster of HP workstations (model 9000 735/125). It supports a hierarchical storage structure by treating the available disk space as a cache. Several on-going projects are investigating applications of Mitra to different domains, e.g., sound-servers, non-linear digital editing, etc. In the future, we envision extensions of Mitra in support of both traditional data as well as continuous media.

Mitra is a software based system that employs off-the-shelf hardware components. Its present hardware platform is a cluster of multi-disk workstations, connected using an ATM switch.

^{Commercial, off-the-shelf hardware components (workstations, networking)}

^{Scalable, multi-workstation implementation}

^{Support for a mix of media types: audio, video}

^{Support for multi-speed fast-forward and fast-rewind for video streams (see slides presented at WITS '97 workshop)}

An overview of Mitra was published as chapter three in the book Multimedia Technologies and Applications for the 21st Century (Editor Borko Furht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, December 1997, ISBN: 0-7923-8074-6). The article first appeared in the Multimedia Tools and Applications journal (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 5(1):79-108, July 1997). Here is an online version of this paper (created with Hyperlatex 1.4, Copyright © 1994 Otfried Schwarzkopf).

This research was supported in part by Hewlett-Packard with an unrestricted cash/equipment gift, and the National Science Foundation under grants IRI-9203389, IRI-9258362 (NYI award), and CDA-9216321.