HERMES

The ESPRIT Long Term Research, no. 9141, HERMES (Foundations of High Performance Multimedia Information Management Systems) is an EC-funded project that will address and solve the fundamental software problems inherent in the design and implementation of these information systems. Important common features of these information systems include the diversity of multimedia data types, the delay-sensitivity and resulting real-time requirements for accessing multimedia objects, the large size of multimedia objects, and their coordinated presentation in space and time. Such features create formidable challenges, which any software solution must confront.

The HERMES project will first survey and analyze the user requirements and technological developments relating to multimedia champion applications. These will be used as the background and as a guiding force for the project.

HERMES will:

• Develop a unifying performance model, capturing the behaviour and characteristics of multimedia storage device hierarchies, multimedia data, and users;
• Design algorithms for the scheduling of access requests and for accessing multi-level storage hierarchies;
• Develop techniques for efficient data placement on (and exploiting the inherent parallelism of) storage devices;
• Develop high performance architectures for the creation of distributed and parallel multimedia servers;
• Design conceptual models facilitating multimedia data addressability,such as content-based querying;
• Develop techniques which complement query languages, facilitating the effective browsing of multimedia data.

The approach will be both theoretical and experimental. To this end, a multimedia server, KYDONIA, will be used as a testbed for the developed solutions. Alternate or complementary approaches may involve the development of detailed simulations driven by synthetic workloads and benchmarks.

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