Extends:
Applications enabling the exploitation of heterogeneous architectures for the embedded market

Status:
1177 / Accepted / Not final / Evaluated

Description:

Preliminaries

In the cluster "Applications enabling the exploitation of heterogeneous
architectures for the embedded market", we have been working with the
coding phase of the MPEG-4 algorithm. We have found the places where the
application can be splitted to provide different accelerators with
parallel work, achieving results presented in [1].

Proposal

For the continuation of the cluster, we propose to apply the same kind
of work to a different algorithm. We are thinking on getting one of the
SPEC2006 applications, like the libquantum, to have a different algorithm
class. From the joint experience with both algorithms, we plan to derive
a set of techniques to be applied to a given algorithm to exploit it in a
heterogeneous architecture.

In the future, the algorithms derived will be included in a software
repository in source form, including documentation and the analysis of the
performance obtained on the different architectures under study.

The architectures under consideration will continue being the STI Cell
BE, the Philips TriMedia, and the STMicroslectronics xSTream. For them,
we will use the currently available compiler toolchains, to exploit
SIMD, vector, and streaming characteristics, when possible.

We expect that this study will help in the development of new approaches and
interesting ideas to be applied to the runtime systems and programming
models for such architectures. We will work to obtain close to 80% of
peak performance of the given algorithm in the architecture.

The fellowship is planned for UPC, and he/she will continue examining the
applications, developing the parallel algorithms, and tune the parallel
versions for the target architectures.

[1] Eric Alvarez, Xavier Martorell, Marisa Gil, Nacho Navarro, "MPEG-4 Port
to the Cell Procesor", ACACES 2007 poster, l'Aquila, Italy, July 2007.

Nature:
Research cluster

Total funding:
Requested: € 26400
Granted: € 26400

Including fellowship funding:
Requested: € 12000
Granted: € 12000

Description of how the funding will be used:

Total funding 26400

Description: 6 people traveling x 4 meetings/year x 600 euros/trip = 14400
10 months fellowship (March - December 2008): 1200x10 = 12000

Duration of the funding:
Requested: 10 month(s)
Granted: 0 month(s), starting on: Thu, September 27, 2007

Participating members:
MARTORELL Xavier (UPC) (--member--)
GIL Marisa (UPC) (--member--)
NAVARRO Nacho (UPC) (--member--)
BERNSTEIN David (IBM) (--member--)
BILAS Angelos (FORTH) (--member--)
MORANCHO Enric (UPC) (--member--)
RAMIREZ Alex (UPC) (--member--)
ZAKS Ayal (IBM) (--member--)

Other people collaborating:

Eric Alvarez

Miscellaneous:

With respect the work on the Cell BE processor, the Barcelona Supercomputing
Center is providing access to a Cell BE based blade, with the toolchain
based on gcc.

Miscellaneous, web site:
http://www.bsc.es