KUMP/D: the Kyushu University multi-media processor

High speed image and video processing is a key technology in multimedia applications, and, therefore, currently, many hardware accelerators to speed up such processing are developed and used. However, for the next generation advanced multimedia applications in the next generation, such as high quality virtual reality, bidirectional visual interface, etc., the hardware accelerators can not deal with tasks involved in these applications. This is because these tasks consist of complex and irregular computation structures, and therefore, it is not easy to implement simple hardware accelerators for these tasks. Considering the above situation, for the next generation multimedia applications, we have been developing a MIMD based multimedia processor, KUMP/D (Kyushu University Multimedia Processor on Datarol-II). KUMP/D is a flexible parallel processor, based on fine grain parallel processing, which is which indispensable in complex and irregular computation, and is also equipped with a specialized I/O network. This I/O network has enough throughput for real time video I/O, providing a mechanism, which supports the synchronization of process executions and real time video frames.