9409666 Vin Recent advances in computing, networking, and storage technologies promise to create an infrastructure in which computer systems will support a wide range of multimedia services through interactive multimedia servers distributed over highspeed networks. The main objective of the research is to synthesize cost-effective system architectures for designing such multimedia servers by developing: (1) efficient disk scheduling algorithms which minimize the average access time to media blocks from disk, (2) novel admission control algorithms that a multimedia server can employ to maximize the number of clients being serviced simultaneously while assuring the quality of service requirements of none of the clients are violated, and (3) algorithms for efficient placement (including replication and distribution as desirable) of multiresolution multimedia objects of disk arrays. Algorithms and protocols that are found to be promising will be implemented and evaluated in a prototype distributed multimedia storage server. ***
