Block-Parallel Programming for Real-Time Embedded Applications

Embedded media applications have traditionally used custom ASICs to meet their real-time performance requirements. However, the combination of increasing chip design cost and availability of commodity many-core processors is making programmable devices increasingly attractive alternatives. Yet for these processors to be successful in this role, programming systems are needed that can automate the task of mapping the applications to the tens-to-hundreds of cores on current and future many-core processors, while simultaneously guaranteeing the real-time throughput constraints. This paper presents a block-parallel program description for embedded real-time media applications and automatic transformations including buffering and parallelization to ensure the program meets the throughput requirements. These transformations are enabled by starting with a high-level, yet intuitive, application description. The description builds on traditional stream programming structures by adding simple control and serialization constructs to enable a greater variety of applications. The result is an application description that provides a balance of flexibility and power to the programmer, while exposing the application structure to the compiler at a high enough level to enable useful transformations without heroic analysis.