Shoah Foundation selects SGI Origin 3400 Servers to assist Documentary ProductionAmsterdam 14 September 2001 The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, established in 1994 by Steven Spielberg to collect the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses of the Holocaust, recently purchased two SGI Origin 3400 servers to facilitate production of television/feature documentaries and interactive teaching aids.
The Shoah Foundation has collected more than 50,000 testimonies from 57 countries in 32 languages, and its task now turns to cataloging more than 100,000 hours of videotaped testimony. The greater than 200,000 hours of archived videotape would take more than 13 years to view in its entirety. One of the foundation's new SGI Origin 3400 servers manages the resulting 180TB video database, and the other SGI Origin 3400 system manages all the querying to the metadata. The metadata is stored in a Sybase database.
The foundation is now focused on the educational use of the visual history testimonies by scholars, students and the public. The SGI Origin 3400 servers were recently used to produce a series of five foreign-language documentaries that incorporated portions of videotaped interviews from the archive of Holocaust survivor and witnesses testimonies. The films are intended for
prime-time television broadcast in their respective countries of Hungary, Poland, Argentina, the Czech Republic and Russia.
The key to quickly locating and retrieving the foundation's meticulously catalogued data is the revolutionary SGI NUMAflex "brick" concept. Because of this modular system structure, the user decides how much CPU, I/O, memory and disk infrastructure to add to the SGI Origin 3400 system. Every component of this scalable architecture can be upgraded, maintained or redeployed
independently, so the SGI Origin 3400 system can evolve as quickly as needed.
Ad Emmen |
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