9203389 Ghandeharizadeh Object-Placement in Parallel Hypermedia Systems This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. Multimedia information systems have emerged as an essential component of many application domains ranging from digital libraries to entertainment technology. However, most implementations of these systems cannot support a continuous display of multimedia objects and suffer from frequent disruptions termed hiccups . This is due to the large size of these objects that requires them to be almost always disk resident, and the disparity between the low I/O bandwidth of the current disk technology and the high bandwidth requirement of multimedia objects. To resolve this limitation, a multimedia object is declustered across multiple disk drives, enabling the system to utilize the aggregate bandwidth of multiple disks to support its continuous retrieval. Moreover, virtual data replication is being developed as a mechanism to support simultaneous display of several objects to different users. This project investigates techniques that: (1) provide on-line access to vast amount of multimedia data; (2) minimize the response time of the system by prefetching data; and (3) maximize the processing capability of the system by optimizing the placement of the objects across the processors. The results of this research are expected to provide a foundation for the development of high performance multimedia information systems that can scale to thousands of processors. ***
