Towards a File System Optimized for Scalable Media
Heiko Sparenberg, Volker Bruns, Seigfried Foessel
Journal of Multimedia Processing and Technologies, Vol. 4, No. 4, 2013.
DOI: 
Link: http://www.dline.info/jmpt/fulltext/v4n4/1.pdf
Abstract:
In professionel moviepost-production, various components are pushed to their performance limits. Former processors for example were not able to playback the JPEG 2000 compressed image-sequences which are used for distribution in Digital Cinema as well as long term storage in digital archiving â€“ inreal time. While todayâ€™s processors are able to decode such files a new bottleneck became part of the processing chain: In many cases conventional Hard Disk Drives (HDD) are not able to deliver the requested data â€“ which is limited to a maximum value of 250 Mbit/s in Digital Cinema â€“ in real time. In this paper we propose an algorithm for increasing the data throughput of conventional HDDs by utilizing the progression order of scalable media files, called UCODAS (Use-Case-Optimized DAta Storage). The motivation is given by the architecture of conventional hard drives, and finding that the file structure of scalablemedia, such as JPEG 2000, can be (re-)arrangedin such a way that the throughput of the disk can be significantly increased - especially if subsequent access patterns to the image-sequence are known a-priori. The advantages and disadvantages of todayâ€™s hard drives are summarized before we show how scaling is achieved within JPEG 2000. Then, various methods for improving the performance of HDDs - taking advantage of the scalability - are proposed and the data sets used for the measurements are described. We performed tests using a collection of common file systems including FAT32, NTFS, ext2 and ext3 as well as RAW data access without a filesystem in order to prove our implementation of the UCODAS algorithm. In particular, we show that UCODAS can increase the data-throughput of a conventional HDD by more than a factor of 3 and thus overcome the bottleneck introduced by conventional HDDs.