Video-on-Demand on the SB-PRAM

We investigate the use of random striping to store movies on the SB--PRAM, a massively parallel multiprocessor. Our simulations show that the SB--PRAM provides enough bandwidth between disks and processors to serve more than a thousand users in a Videoon -Demand environment. Furthermore we present a novel method to use a parity scheme in order to decrease disk load in addition to provide fault tolerance. 1 Introduction For Video--on--Demand servers, the organization of disk storage is one of the most important problems. The most popular schemes to store movies on a set of hard disks are rate staggering [5] and random striping [6]. Rate staggering allows for a very regular distribution of blocks onto disks, but restricts bit rates to few values. Random striping distributes a movie over n disks by randomly permuting n consecutive blocks over all disks. Random Striping thus aims at obtaining high and equal disk utilization, while the bit rates of different movies can be chosen independ..