Multilevel parallelization on the cell/B.E. for a motion JPEG 2000 encoding server

The Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) is a novel multi-core microprocessor designed to provide high-performance processing capabilities for a wide range of applications. In this paper, we describe the world's first JPEG 2000 and Motion JPEG 2000 encoder on Cell/B.E. Novel parallelization techniques for a Motion JPEG 2000 encoder that unleash the performance of the Cell/B.E. are proposed. Our Motion JPEG 2000 encoder consists of multiple video frame encoding servers on a cluster system for high-level parallelization. Each video frame encoding server runs on a heterogeneous multi-core Cell/B.E. processor, and utilizes its 8 Synergistic Processor Elements (SPEs) for low-level parallelization of the time consuming parts of the JPEG 2000 encoding process, such as the wavelet transform, the bit modeling, and the arithmetic coding. The effectiveness of high-level parallelization by the cluster system is also described, not only for the parallel encoding, but also for scalable performance improvement for real-time encoding and future enhancements. We developed all of the code from scratch for effective multilevel parallelization. Our results show that the Cell/B.E. is extremely efficient for this workload compared with commercially available processors, and thus we conclude that the Cell/B.E. is quite suitable for encoding next generation large pixel formats, such as 4K/2K-Digital Cinema.