A logical memory model for scaling parallel multimedia workloads

Abstract

The growing power of processors allows us to implement increasingly complex multimedia algorithms. However, this processor power is only available if the algorithms are implemented in a way that exploits the multi-core parallelism of these processors. Today, this requires that the skillsets required for algorithm development and for parallel programming are tightly combined to achieve this.By providing a language, compiler and runtime that allows algorithm developers to specify algorithms as a series of data-transforming kernels written in C++, while the parallelization opportunities are built into the compiler and runtime, we hope to alleviate this need for a dual skillset.In this paper, we focus on the performance improvements that our system can achieve by combining language design, compiler knowledge, and runtime decisions to overcome performance bottlenecks from fine-grained kernel scheduling and cache-line contention without adapting the algorithms they implement.