Print Email Facebook Twitter Parallel H.264 Decoding Strategies for Cell Broadband Engine Title Parallel H.264 Decoding Strategies for Cell Broadband Engine Author Chi, C.C. Contributor Meenderinck, C. (mentor) Juurlink, B. (mentor) Faculty Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science Department Microelectronics & Computer Engineering Programme CE Date 2010-02-05 Abstract How to develop effcient and scalable parallel applications is the key challenge for emerging many-core architectures. We investigate this question by implementing and comparing two parallel H.264 decoders on the Cell architecture. It is expected that future many-cores will use a Cell-like local store memory hierarchy, rather than a non-scalable shared memory. The two implemented parallel algo-rithms, the Task Pool (TP) and the novel Ring-Line (RL) approach, both exploit macroblock-level parallelism. The TP implementation follows the master-slave paradigm and is very dynamic so that in theory perfect load balancing can be achieved. The RL approach is distributed and more predictable in the sense that the mapping of macroblocks to processing elements is fixed. This allows to better exploit data locality, to overlap communication with computation, and to reduce communication and synchronization overhead. While TP is more scalable in theory, the actual scalability favors RL. Using 16 SPEs, RL obtains a scalability of 12x, while the TP implementation only 10.3x. More importantly, the absolute performance of RL is much higher. Using 16 SPEs, RL achieves a throughput of 139.6 frames per second (fps) while TP achieves only 76.6 fps. A large part of the additional performance advantage is due to hiding the memory latency. From the results we conclude that in order to fully leverage the performance of future many-cores, a centralized master should be avoided and the mapping of tasks to cores should be predictable in order to be able to hide the memory latency. Subject H.264Cell Broadband Engineparalleldecoding To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:7761537c-0549-4744-8d59-fae2c3398b9e Embargo date 2010-02-11 Part of collection Student theses Document type master thesis Rights (c) 2010 Chi, C.C. Files PDF thesis-chi-final.pdf 1.16 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:7761537c-0549-4744-8d59-fae2c3398b9e/datastream/OBJ/view