Paper Info
Title
A Look-Ahead Task Management Unit for Embedded Multi-Core Architectures
Abstract
Efficient utilization of multi-core architectures relies on the partitioning of applications into tasks and mapping the tasks to cores. In some applications (e.g. H.264 video decoding parallelized at macro-block level) these tasks have dependencies among each other. Task scheduling, consisting of selecting a task with satisfied dependencies and mapping it to a core, is typically a functionality delegated to the operating system. In this paper we present a hardware Task Management Unit (TMU) that looks ahead in time to find tasks to be executed by a multi-core architecture. The look-ahead functionality is shown to reduce the task management overhead by 40-50% when executing a parallelized version of an H.264 video decoder on an architecture with up to 16 cores. In overall, the TMU-based multi-core architecture reaches a speedup of more than 14times on 16 cores running H.264 video decoding, assuming CABAC is implemented in a dedicated coprocessor.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1109/DSD.2008.45
Parma
Keywords
Field
DocType
parallelized version,task scheduling,operating system,h.264 video decoding,multi-core architecture,task management overhead,h.264 video decoder,look-ahead task management unit,look-ahead functionality,tmu-based multi-core architecture,h.264 video,multi-core architectures,binary codes,management,acceleration,scheduling,multi core,coprocessor,satisfiability,embedded systems,computer architecture,encoding,context adaptive binary arithmetic coding,decoding,look ahead
High-definition video,Task management,Computer science,Scheduling (computing),Real-time computing,Coprocessor,Multi-core processor,Video decoder,Speedup,Context-adaptive binary arithmetic coding,Computer architecture,Parallel computing,Embedded system
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-0-7695-3277-6
18
0.86
References 
Authors
7
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Magnus Sjalander119824.73
Andrei Terechko21338.64
Marc Duranton313710.77