Parallelization of multimedia applications on the multi-level computing architecture

The Multi-Level Computing Architecture (MLCA) is a novel parallel System-on-a-Chip architecture targeted for multimedia applications. It features a top level controller that automatically extracts task level parallelism using techniques similar to how instruction level parallelism is extracted by superscalar processors. This allows the MLCA to support a simple programming model that is similar to sequential programming. In order to assist programmers to easily and efficiently port multimedia applications to the MLCA programming model, a compilation environment is designed. This compilation environment enhances parallelism in MLCA programs by applying three simple code transformations that are based on known compiler optimizations. In this paper, we describe the MLCA architecture, its programming model, its compilation environment and an evaluation of its performance. Our experimental evaluation with three real multimedia applications and an MLCA simulator shows that the MLCA is a viable architecture and scaling speedups can be obtained using the compilation environment with little programmer effort.