This module explores the technology stack that underpins a modern software-defined media facility. Rather than focusing on dedicated broadcast appliances, participants will gain an understanding of the IT infrastructure that enables scalable, high-performance media processing. The session covers the networking technologies, including Ethernet, RDMA, RoCEv2, and emerging developments such as Ultra Ethernet. It also introduces key server architecture concepts, including NUMA topology, CPU affinity (core pinning), and GPU pass-through, and explains why they matter for predictable application performance.

Building on this foundation, the module examines virtualisation, including hypervisors, as well as Linux and lightweight Kubernetes platforms such as k3s.

A key focus is the Media eXchange Layer (MXL), which abstracts media handling away from underlying transport and compute. MXL enables media flows to be exchanged between applications in a consistent, software-defined manner, regardless of physical location. It operates in two complementary modes: intra-node, where media is exchanged efficiently within a single server across processes, GPUs, or containers; and inter-node, where media is transported across the network between distributed nodes using high-performance transport mechanisms such as RDMA or RoCEv2. This abstraction decouples applications from the complexity of the underlying infrastructure while maintaining real-time performance.

Finally, the module highlights the architectural shift towards fully asynchronous systems. The emphasis moves from transport efficiency alone to overall compute efficiency, enabling scalable and flexible media facility design.