Efficient data layout, scheduling and playout control in MARS

Large-scale on-demand multimedia servers thatcan provide independent and interactive access to a vastamount of multimedia information to a large number ofconcurrent clients will be required for a widespread deployment of exciting multimedia applications. Our project, calledMassively-parallel And Real-time Storage (MARS) is aimedat prototype development of such a large-scale server. Thispaper primarily focuses on the distributed data layout andscheduling techniques developed as a part of this project.These techniques support a high degree of parallelism andconcurrency, and efficiently implement various playout control operations, such as fast forward, rewind, pause, resume,frame advance and random access.