High-performance multimedia applications and the Internet

Although the development and use of Internet multimedia applications are increasing, the ability to manipulate and process multimedia information on the Internet is missing. The Internet's rich connectivity makes it an ideal blueprint for a high-performance computing system: millions and millions of heterogeneous computing nodes that can support open-standards protocols for communication and exchange of information. The implementation of high-performance multimedia computing on the Internet requires mapping the application computation onto a set of networked processing resources. Fortunately, multimedia processing exhibits a high degree of parallelism that can benefit from the Internet architecture's concurrent nature. Multimedia applications can exploit three types of parallelism: functional, temporal and spatial.