An Architecture for Distributed High Performance Video Processing in the Cloud

Abstract

Video processing applications are notably data intense, time, and resource consuming. Upfront infrastructure investment is usually high, specially when dealing with applications where time-to- market is a crucial requirement, e.g., breaking news and journalism. Such infrastructures are often inefficient, because due to demand variations, resources may end up idle a good portion of the time. In this paper, we propose the Split&Merge architecture for high performance video processing, a generalization of the MapReduce paradigm that rationalizes the use of resources by exploring on demand computing. To illustrate the approach, we discuss an implementation of the Split&Merge architecture, that reduces video encoding times to fixed duration, independently of the input size of the video file, by using dynamic resource provisioning in the Cloud.