Low-overhead run-time scheduling for fine-grained acceleration of signal processing systems

In this paper, we present four scheduling algorithms that provide flexible utilization of fine-grain DSP accelerators with low run-time overhead. Methods that have originally been used in operations research are implemented in a way that minimizes the amount of run-time computations. These low overhead scheduling methods can be used for synchronization in multi-processor systems, especially when dedicated co-processors implement tasks with low turnaround times. We demonstrate our methods by an application to MPEG-4 video decoding. In this demonstration, MPEG-4 macroblock decoding is modeled as a permutation flowshop problem and our proposed algorithms are applied to schedule co-processors that implement MPEG-4 block decoding operations. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheduling approach.