Parallel Processing of Multimedia Data in a Heterogeneous Computing Environment

Recently, many multimedia applications can be parallelized by using multicore platforms such as CPU and GPU. In this paper, we propose a parallel processing approach for a multimedia application by using both CPU and GPU. Instead of distributing the parallelizable workload to either CPU or GPU(i.e., homogeneous computing), we distribute the workload simultaneously into both CPU and GPU(i.e., heterogeneous computing) by using OpenCL. Based on the experimental results with a photomosaic application, we confirm that the proposed parallel processing approach can provide better performance than the typical parallel processing approach by utilizing the given resource maximally.