LOAD BALANCING TECHNIQUE FOR VIDEO SIGNAL PROCESSING ON A MULTICOMPUTER TYPE DSP.

To extract full performance from a multicomputer digital signal processing (DSP) system, the development of a viable load-balancing technique is considered indispensable. The authors describe a task allocation and control methodology for image signal processing, such as is used in a low-bit rate (e. g. , 64-kb/s) motion-picture coding system. On a massive homogeneous multicomputer-type DSP system, the following approaches increase system performance substantially: (1) task scheduling with interframe prediction; (2) layered large-grain data flow; and (3) predefined local reassignment of processing. The effects of these various methods are examined in the context of a low-bit-rate motion-picture codec with motion-compensation and vector-quantization application.