Hyun-ki Baik

Novel approaches to parallel H.264 decoder on symmetric multicore systems

Novel approaches to parallel H.264 decoder for symmetric multicore processors are presented. The basic partitioning of the decoder is coarse-grained and hybrid method of the data partitioning and functional partitioning. We investigate the performance bottleneck of the parallelized decoder, and propose two new approaches, software memory throttling and fair load balancing. The software memory throttling limits the number of cores involved in the parallel motion compensation to achieve better speedup and power-saving. The fair load balancing for deblocking filter reduces load imbalance caused by the conventional static partitioning method. From the evaluation on two different symmetric multicore platforms, proposed approaches show up to 24% of speedup when there is much bandwidth contention.

Analysis and Parallelization of H.264 decoder on Cell Broadband Engine Architecture

Emerging video coding technology like H.264/AVC achieves high compression efficiency, which enables high quality video at the same or lower bitrate. However, those advanced coding techniques come at the cost of more computational power. Developed with such multimedia applications in mind, the CELL broadband engine (BE) processor was designed as a heterogeneous on-chip multicore processor to meet the required high performance. In this paper, we analyze the computational requirements of H.264 decoder per-module basis and implement parallelized H.264 decoder on the CELL processor based on the profile result. We propose and implement a hybrid partitioning technique that combines both functional and data partitioning to avoid the dependencies imposed by H.264 decoder, and optimize it using SIMD instructions. Through experiments, the parallelized H.264 decoder runs about 3.5 times faster than the single core (PPE only) decoder, by using 1 PPE and 4 SPEs.

H.264/AVC decoder parallelization and optimization on asymetric multicore platform using dynamic load balancing

We propose a new method for H.264/AVC parallel decoder implementation on the CELL Broadband Engine processor. To decode the full HD H.264 stream in real time, the high performance processing is required due to the high computation and complexity. Our decoder exploits the functional partition method to parallelize the H.264 decoder on multicore platform. The load of performance critical module is dynamically balanced with less computational module to fully utilize of the multicore processors. The experimental results of proposed load balancing method show that it runs about 1.4 times faster than the normal parallel decoder with same hardware requirement - 1 PPE and 3 SPEs. This result is more than 4 times faster performance than that of the single core decoder - PPE only.