Using PC's as continous media servers

Peter Bosch
Universiteit Twente
<Peter.Bosch@huygens.org>

A PC today is equipped with an I/O bus that is capable of transferring data at a rate up to 126MBps, SCSI buses are capable of transferring data with a throughput of up to 40MBps and the sustained disk performance is now up to 13.5MBps per disk. We have combined a standard PC with a number of SCSI cards and high speed disks to learn how fast a PC can transfer data internally.

The reason for performing these throughput experiments is to understand how to construct a continuous-media server that is capable of transferring at least 20 concurrent digitized audio and video streams. The number 20 was chosen because our ATM network technology is capable of transferring at most 20 concurrent compressed audio and video streams. The throughput experiments showed that we were too conservative: when system software is carefully tuned, applications can run the I/O hardware in excess of 100MBps.

This lecture describes the measurements we have performed and describes how to construct system software to allow applications to use the full I/O bandwidth.

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6 april 1998