Resource recycling: putting idle resources to work on a composable accelerator

Mobile computing platforms in the form of smart phones, netbooks, and personal digital assistants have become an integral part of our everyday lives. Moving ahead to the future, mobile multimedia support will become a key differentiating factor for customers. Features such as high-definition audio and video, video conferencing, 3D graphics, and image projection will lead to the adoption of one phone over another. However, in contrast to wireless signal processing which is dominated by vectorizable computation, mobile multimedia applications often contain complex control flow and variable computational requirements. Moreover, data access is more complex where media applications typically operate on multi-dimensional vectors of data rather than single-dimensional vectors with simple strides. To handle these complexities, composable accelerators such as the Polymorphic Pipeline Array, or PPA, present an appealing hardware platform by adding a degree of hardware configurability over exist...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CASES
• Authors: Yongjun Park, Hyunchul Park, Scott A. Mahlke, Sukjin Kim
• Keywords: CASES 2010, Compilation Framework, Mobile Multimedia, Resource, System Software