Efficient resource management to handle multimedia data is one of the most important challenges of the next decade. The needs implied by multimedia sources may easily lead to data and processing explosion. The requirement to store, process, and manage large data sets naturally pose the question of programmable parallel processing systems in supporting and enabling multimedia technology. Furthermore, the indexing and retrieval of multimedia data includes time-consuming algorithms, thus high-performance architectures and algorithms are necessary in order to allow the use of multimedia databases and archives in real-world scenarios.
A number of novel and hard questions arise in this context, which can be answered only by applying techniques of parallel and/or distributed computing. The scope of this topic embraces issues from high-performance coding and retrieving over parallel architectures for multimedia servers, databases and information systems (including grids), up to highly distributed architectures in heterogeneous, wired and wireless networks. In short, the two main areas that were considered for this topic are (1) High-Performance Multimedia, including parallel and distributed algorithms for fast coding and retrieval of multimedia data or metadata and architectures and algorithms for multimedia servers, databases and information systems (including grids); (2) Distributed Multimedia, in particular, architectures and algorithms for QoS- and context-awareness in heterogeneous (wired and wireless) networks and distributed architectures related to MPEG, including novel ideas regarding “Universal Media Access” as defined in MPEG-21.
This year 13 papers of high value were submitted to this topic area. We thank all authors for their submissions. All papers were reviewed by 4 reviewers. 5 papers were selected to be presented at EuroPar 2005, in two sessions. One session is devoted to Architectures for distributed multimedia services and contains the papers “Dynamic distributed collaborative merging policy to optimize the multicasting delivery scheme”, “Dynamic proxy-cache multiplication inside LANs” and the “Perspective for Lecture Videos”. The second session, on Coding based enhancements of video services, contains the papers “A Scene-based Bandwidth Allocation Scheme for Transferring VBR Streams on Clustered Video Servers” and “DCT Block Conversion for H.264/AVC video transcoding”.