Massive video-surveillance parallelization on the Cell Broadband Engine processor

The Cell Broadband Engine® (Cell/B.E.®) is a multicore processor with a PowerPC® processor element (PPE) and eight synergistic processor elements (SPEs). The Cell/B.E. architecture is designed to improve upon conventional processors in terms of memory latency, bandwidth, and power consumption. In this paper, we discuss the parallelization, implementation, and performance of a video-surveillance application on the Cell/B.E. We report the video-surveillance application performance measured on a computer with one Cell/B.E. processor and with varying numbers of SPEs enabled. These results were compared with the results obtained on the single PPE of the Cell/B.E. with all eight SPEs disabled. The results indicate that our video-surveillance application performs approximately 25 times faster on the eight-SPE-core Cell/B.E. than modern reduced instruction set computer processors by processing input data from eight separate surveillance-video streams in parallel.