SBIR Phase I: Zipreel: High Performance Cloud Processing Platform for Internet and Mobile Video

This Small Business Innovation Research Program (SBIR) Phase I project is aimed at the development and commercialization of a high-performance cloud processing platform for Internet- and mobile-based video services. Target users of this platform would initiate live video streams, or upload video files, through a web portal or application programming interface (API) for processing services (such as transcoding to produce formats and bit-rates suitable for display on mobile devices). Building this platform is challenging due to the need to (a) provide real-time guarantees on shared infrastructure, (b) achieve linear performance scaling, (c) guarantee content security and (d) deliver high availability (99.99%). To address these challenges, the feasibility of (a) a novel, video-aware parallel and distributed stream processing framework (called Scarlet), and (b) a low-overhead isolation framework (called Shield), will be explored in phase I of this project. Scarlet's design and implementation aim for guaranteed real-time processing and linear performance scaling (up to 100 compute units) while delivering professional-grade video quality. Shield should isolate content and resources for real-time media processing on shared infrastructure; content security should be comparable with today's virtual machine (VM) technology but without the associated performance penalties. The broader impact/commercial potential of this project will be significant as the underlying technology simplifies video processing workflows and reduces associated costs for enterprises that work with large volumes of media content. In particular, the cloud video services resulting from this project will benefit TV broadcasters, Internet-based media companies and mobile video service providers, ultimately benefiting consumers of video in terms of lower prices and better quality. The proposed platform to be developed in this project will be the first to leverage ground-up distributed processing techniques with a high degree of parallelism, scale and reliability to achieve fast turn-around times (>>10x real-time) for media processing. These characteristics will enable this platform to serve as an efficiency enabler for this large and fast-growing Internet video services industry, while also advancing our scientific understanding of cloud technology as applied to media processing. Other emerging vertical segments likely to benefit from this platform include on-line education, surveillance, and augmented reality.