Professional movie distribution and mastering formats use high quality, intra-frame compression formats like JPEG 2000, a codec allowing for scalability in resolution and quality. Latest processor types, either CPUs or high-end GPUs, can decode digital cinema-compliant JPEG 2000 image sequences in real-time. This brings out a new bottleneck during a movie playback since current consumer hard-drives are not fast enough for data rates being used in digital cinema or digital archiving. This paper shows a method for using file-inherent scalability on file system level as well as a caching strategy especially adapted for scalable media files.

A significant number of new Java-based technologies for mobile code (aka agents) have recently emerged. The 'Aglets' system, from IBM's research labs, provides an elegant mechanism for creating mobile code, but lacks a native scheduling mechanism for determining where code should be executed. We present the results of an investigation into adding sophisticated scheduling capabilities to Aglets (which we refer to as brilliant Aglets, or Baglets) from the H-SWEB project, which provides hierarchical scheduling across sets of WWW server clusters. H-SWEB uses scheduling techniques in monitoring and adapting to workload variation at distributed server clusters for supporting distributed computation. We show how the two systems can be integrated, and present several algorithms indicating a major advantage (over 350%) can be achieved through the use of dynamic scheduling information. We provide a detailed discussion of our system architecture and implementation, and briefly summarize the experimental results which have been achieved.