Efficient Exploitation of Parallelism in General Purpose Processor Based Systems for Image and Video Processing Applications

摘要

This paper proposes a classification of the parallelisms in general-purpose processor based systems in three main categories. One category is the intra-processor parallelism that includes multimedia instructions and superscalar and VLIW architectures. The former takes advantage of data parallelism. The latter benefit from instruction level parallelism. Another category is the inter-processor parallelism. We consider the parallelism between processors inside shared memory symmetric multiprocessor systems and in distributed memory clusters of workstations. Finally, in the last category, main features of the system level parallelism are studied including the input/output operations, the memory hierarchy and the exploitation of external processing. The potential gain is studied for each type of parallelism available in general-purpose processor based systems from a theoretical point of view as well as for existing image and video applications. The results in this paper showed that the exploitation of the different levels of parallelism available in PC workstations can lead to considerable gains in speed when optimizing a multimedia application. Finally the results of this work can be used to influence the design of new multimedia systems and media processors.