Realistic Task Parallelization of the H.264 Decoding Algorithm for Multiprocessors

There is a phenomenon that hardware technology has developed ahead of software technology in recent years. Companies lack of software techniques that can fully utilize the modern multi-core computing resources, mainly due to the difficulty of investigating the inherent parallelism inside a software. This problem exists in products ranging from energy-sensitive smartphones to performance-eager data centers. In this paper, we present a case study on the parallelization of the complex industry standard H.264 HDTV decoder application in multi-core systems. An optimal schedule of the tasks is obtained and implemented by a carefully-defined software parallelization framework (SPF). The parallel software framework is proposed together with a set of rules to direct parallel software programming (PSPR). A pre-processing phase based on the rules is applied to the source code to make the SPF applicable. The task-level parallel version of the H.264 decoder is implemented and tested extensively on a workstation running Linux. Significant performance improvement is observed for a set of benchmarks composed of 720p videos. The SPF and the PSPR will together serve as a reference for future parallel software implementations and direct the development of automated tools.