Hardware/software codesign for video compression using the EXECUBE processing array

Real time image processing is an important area of study that requires the computational power of parallel computers. In this paper MPEG video compression is used as a benchmark application to study and improve the performance of the processor-in-memory (PIM) EXECUBE array which has been proposed as a solution for the PetaFlop project. Since parallel computers naturally lend themselves to the display of such pictures, the EXECUBE array of parallel processors is a logical choice. It is shown that the array is nor able to display video in real time due to computational intensive algorithms within MPEG, as well as an internal communication bottleneck. As such, hardware/software codesign is used to overcome these problems while minimizing design time. Through the use of specialized hardware, the timing constraints may be met. Results are shown which illustrate the efficiency of the system as well as the savings achieved.