Run-time parallelization switching for resource optimization on an MPSoC platform

The recent development of multimedia applications on mobile terminals raised the need for flexible and scalable computing platforms that are capable of providing considerable (application specific) computational performance within a low cost and a low energy budget. The MPSoC with multi-disciplinary approach, resolving application mapping, platform architecture and runtime management issues, provides such multiple heterogeneous, flexible processing elements. In MPSoC, the run-time manager takes the design time exploration information as an input and selects an active Pareto point based on quality requirement and available platform resources, where a Pareto point corresponds to a particular parallelization possibility of the target application. To use system’s scalability at best and enhance application’s flexibility a step further, the resource management and Pareto point selection decisions need to be adjustable at run-time. This research work experiment run-time Pareto point switching for the MPEG-4 encoder. The work involves design time exploration and then embedding of two parallelization possibilities of the MPEG-4 encoder into one single component and enabling run-time switching between these parallelizations, to give run-time control over adjusting performance-cost criteria and allocation deallocation of hardware resources at run-time. The new system has the capability to encode each video frame with different parallelization. The obtained results offer a number of operating points on the Pareto curve in between the previous ones at sequence encoding level. The run-time manager can improve application performance up to 50 % or can save memory bandwidth up to 15 %, according to quality request.