A Distributed System for Massive Generation of Synthetic Video Using GPUs

Audio-visual interactive content is very common nowadays. It has many applications in very different fields, from videogames to visualization of scientific data. However, there are environments such as digital television in which the delivery of interactive content is of interest, but are limited by the shortcomings of the players. For example, in cable TV environments users access content through a set-top box, which is usually very limited in computing power due to cost, power consumption and the need to keep a moderate size. Furthermore, set-top boxes do not usually have specific hardware for graphics processing (GPU, Graphics Processing Unit) desirable for high quality interactive content, but rather are optimized for real time decoding of video in hardware (usually Mpeg-2, in very recent ones h.264). In this work we describe a distributed system for the creation of synthetic content and its encoding to digital video to send it to the clients. The most important features to provide are scalability and fault tolerance, in order to support a large number of concurrent users with an uninterrupted service.