Parallel Implementation of an MPEG-2 Encoder using Message-Passing/Multithreading

摘要

The computational demands of multimedia applications have been increasing due to the quest for improved quality and resolution. Sequential implementations may not be able to meet such computational demands. This makes it necessary to explore efficient parallel implementations for such applications including high resolution video compression. This paper explores a novel parallel encoder implementation of the industry standard MPEG-2 video compression algorithm. The proposed approach exploits parallelism at two levels. First at the coarse grain level using standard message passing interface (MPI) between each node of a Beowulf cluster. Parallelism is also exploited in a multi-threaded pipeline created using Pthreads within each node. The resulting performance of this approach is shown to exceed the performance of previous approaches as the number of processing elements is scaled higher.