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A Low-overhead Scheduling Methodology for Fine-grained Acceleration of Signal Processing Systems

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Abstract

Fine-grained accelerators have the potential to deliver significant benefits in various platforms for embedded signal processing. Due to the moderate complexity of their targeted operations, these accelerators must be managed with minimal run-time overhead. In this paper, we present a methodology for applying flow-shop scheduling techniques to make effective, low-overhead use of fine-grained DSP accelerators. We formulate the underlying scheduling approach in terms of general flow-shop scheduling concepts, and demonstrate our methodology concretely by applying it to MPEG-4 video decoding. We present quantitative experiments on a soft processor that runs on a field-programmable gate array, and provide insight on trends and trade-offs among different flow-shop scheduling approaches when applied to run-time management of fine-grained acceleration.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partially funded by the Nokia Foundation, the US National Science Foundation (Grant number 0325119), Finnish Graduate School for Electronics, Telecommunication and Automation, and Tekes projects ECUUS and NECST.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Machine Vision Group, University of Oulu, P.O. Box 4500, Oulu, 90014, Finland

    Jani Boutellier

  2. Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Shuvra S. Bhattacharyya

  3. Machine Vision Group, University of Oulu, P.O. Box 4500, Oulu, 90014, Finland

    Olli Silvén

Authors
  1. Jani Boutellier
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  2. Shuvra S. Bhattacharyya
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  3. Olli Silvén
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Correspondence to Jani Boutellier.

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Boutellier, J., Bhattacharyya, S.S. & Silvén, O. A Low-overhead Scheduling Methodology for Fine-grained Acceleration of Signal Processing Systems. J Sign Process Syst 60, 333–343 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-009-0366-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-009-0366-z

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