[54] MULTIMEDIA SERVER WITH EFFICIENT MULTIMEDIA DATA ACCESS SCHEME
[75] Inventor: Masaki Suzuki, Kanagawa-ken, Japan
[73] Assignee: Kabushiki Kaisha Toshiba, Kawasaki, Japan
[21] Appl. No.: 08/616,807
[22] Filed: Mar. 15, 1996
[30] Foreign Application Priority Data
Mar. 16, 1995 [IP] lapan 7-083452
[51] Int. CI. G06F 17 00
[52] U.S. CI 395/200.49
[58] Field of Search 395/200.49; 348/12;
711/112, 113, 114, 104
[56] References Cited
U.S. PATENT DOCUMENTS
5,553,005 9/1996 Voeten et al 395/200.49
5,574,662 11/1996 Windrem et al 395/200.49
5,610,841 3/1997 Tanaka et al 395/200.49
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
Buck, "The Oracle Media Server for nCUBE Massively Parallel Systems", Proceedings of 8th International Parallel Processing Symposium, pp. 670-673, (1994).
A multimedia server capable of reducing a number of accesses to memory devices with low access speed. Whether a desired multimedia data requested by one terminal connected with one input/output unit is present in a buffer of another input/output unit is judged, and the desired multimedia data is transferred to a buffer of that one input/output unit, from the multimedia data storage device when the desired multimedia data is judged as not present, or from a buffer of that another input/output unit when the desired multimedia data is judged as present. It is also possible to predict future necessary multimedia data at each input/ output unit, monitor the multimedia data transferred through the network, and pre-fetch the future necessary multimedia data from the monitored multimedia data. It is also possible to combine a plurality of requests for an identical multimedia data issued by different terminals connected with different input/output units within a prescribed period of time into a single unified request, so that the identical multimedia data can be obtained by the single access and transferred to the different input/output units simultaneously.
20 Claims, 21 Drawing Sheets
