Doctoral Dissertation Processing Cyclic Multimedia Workloads on Modern Architectures

ii Working with modern architectures for high performance applications is increasingly more diffi-cult for programmers as the complexity of both the system architectures and software continue to increase. The level of hand tuning and native adaptations required to achieve high performance comes at the cost of limiting the portability of the software. For instance, we show that a compute intensive DCT algorithm performs better on graphic processors than the best algorithm for x86. In particular, limited portability is true for cyclic multimedia workloads, a set of programs that run continuously with strict requirements for high performance and low latency. An example of a typical multimedia workload is a pipeline of many small image processing algorithms working in tandem to complete a particular task. The input can be videos from one or more live cam-eras, and the output is a set of video frames with elements from several of the source videos, for example as stitched panorama frames or 3D warped video. Such a setup runs continuously and potentially needs to adapt to various degrees of changes in the setup without interruptions or downtime