5 Designing Distributed Multimedia Systems using PARSE A.Y. Liu* T.S. Chan** I. Gorton*** CaST Lab, School of Computer Science and Engineering,* University of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW 2052, Australia tel: +61 -2 385 4019,fax: +61 -2 385 5995 contact email: annaliu@cse.unsw.edu.au Division of Radio Physics, CSIRO, Sydney, Australia** contact email: tchan@ rp. csiro.au, Division of Information Technology, CSIRO, Sydney, Australia*** contact email: ian.gorton@dit.csiro.au Abstract With recent vast improvements in computer hardware, in particular, the processing capacity of multimedia database servers, and high performance of networks, distributed multimedia applications are becoming a reality. This paper presents an object-based approach to the design of distributed multimedia software. In particular, the PARSE methodology for designing parallel and distributed systems is employed. Justification of the object-based approach is given, and an overview of the PARSE process graph notation is presented. A case-study of a video-on-demand application is then presented, and a mapping from the design to an implementation based on Windows NT is described. Keywords Distributed system design, multimedia systems, parallel software engineering, PARSE 1 INTRODUCTION Advances in computer and media technology have enabled the development of high performance multimedia workstations and servers (Jadav.l995), (Taylor.l995). In addition to processing traditional computer data, these workstations are designed to integrate processing of other media types, such as video, image, voice and sound. On another level, the emergence of high-speed, broadband networks such as B-ISON (Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network) (Minzer.l989) have accelerated the development of highly interactive distributed I. Jelly et al. (eds.), Software Engineering for Parallel and Distributed Systems © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 1996