Project Objectives

Combine low cost, high density, high performance storage devices with highly scalable switching technology

Develop and integrate a near linear highly scalable switching fabric, capable of up to 1 Terabit of bandwidth performance

Dramatically reduce the cost of large scale video distribution, editing and security systems

Contribution to the creation of new learning methods through low cost availability of rich media

Enterprises that are looking to provide new video-based applications for corporate communications, e-learning or other rich media applications face the challenge of running high bandwidth applications across existing infrastructures. This age old problem of bandwidth requirements vs. bandwidth cost is an especially big challenge for emerging applications and is limiting their wide spread deployment. The prime goal of the project is to create a new set of technology building blocks to enable an affordable content distribution network scalable from tens of Gigabytes to Terabits. This will enable the delivery of many new high-quality, rich media experiences to large numbers of users.

The networking of audio-visual information has a number of discrete implementations, typified by video servers used in video editing, video-on-demand distribution and archiving. A key requirement of all these networks is the ability to transmit large data files from one source to another. Most of these networks require the transmission of large files to many recipients (‘multicasting’), often at different times. This market has focused historically on the transmission of corporate video or movie clips to a wide number of users.

More recently, new initiatives have been started to create and make widely accessible National video archive material. The historic video content is first transferred from the original film and video tape origin to a digital medium and stored. This archive of culturally important digital information then needs to be connected to a high bandwidth network for wide spread distribution. Many initiatives, such as the “Prestospace” Integrated Project proposal, are focused on this specific application to ensure that our cultural video heritage is preserved and made accessible to all. The primary focus of that project is in the development of high level software applications to manage and catalogue such an archive so that the database structures can be searched and stored efficiently.

The scope of our SIVSS project is to provide a technology infrastructure capable of supporting such a large scale project. It will provide new technology building blocks which will enable the creation and wide spread deployment of affordable large scale rich media video networks.