Distributed MultiModal Media Server

The Idiap Research Institute has been active for almost two decades in Swiss, European and Worldwide projects and consortiums where the acquisition, storage, distribution, processing, and evaluation of very large amounts of digital data was playing a central role in the execution and success of the research. To name but a few, Idiap has been and still is leading or involved in:

• the NCCR IM2 on Interactive Multimodal Information Management;
• the AMI and AMIDA EU FP6 projects;
• the MOBIO FP7 project;
• the DARPA/ GALE US project.

Efficient access to the very large data sets involved is of paramount importance for Idiap to maintain its leadership in those projects.

The Distributed MultiModal Media Server (R'Equip) project thus aims at adding a high-capacity and high-bandwidth storage system to Idiap research infrastructure using Sun Microsystem's Lustre technology (see http://lustre.org).

Lustre is an open source file system which features an architecture scalable to petabytes of capacity and gigabytes per second of I/O bandwidth, thanks to parallel access to distributed storage nodes. It benefits from a successful history in High Performance Computing and among the Top500 Supercomputing Sites in the world (see http://top500.org).

The planned implementation will allow Idiap to extend its storage capacity by several hundred terabytes along with an aggregated bandwidth of several gigabytes per second and offer a leading-edge storage system for its research.

The Distributed MultiModal Media Server (R'Equip) project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (see http://www.snf.ch).