The Sony-Toshiba-IBM Cell Broadband Engine is a
heterogeneous multicore architecture that consists of a
traditional microprocessor (PPE) with eight SIMD coprocessing
units (SPEs) integrated on-chip. While the
Cell/B.E. processor is designed with multimedia applications
in mind, there are currently no open-source, optimized
implementations of such applications available. In this paper,
we present the design and implementation behind the
creation of an optimized MPEG-2 software decoder for this
unique parallel architecture, and demonstrate its performance
through an experimental study.
This is the first parallelization of an MPEG-2 decoder
for a commodity heterogeneous multicore processor such
as the IBM Cell/B.E. While Drake et al. have recently
parallelized MPEG-2 using StreamIt for a streaming architecture,
our algorithm is quite different and is the first
to address the new challenges related to the optimization
and tuning of a multicore algorithm with DMA transfers
and local store memory. Our design and efficient implementation
target the architectural features provided by the
heterogeneous multicore processor. We give an experimental
study on Sony PlayStation 3 and IBM QS20 dual-Cell
Blade platforms. For instance, using 16 SPEs on the IBM
QS20, our decoder runs 3.088 times faster than a 3.2 GHz
Intel Xeon and achieves a speedup of over 10.545 compared
with a PPE-only implementation. Our source code is freelyavailable
through SourceForge under the CellBuzz project.
