PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF A JPEG ENCODER MAPPED ONTO A VIRTUAL MPSoC-NoC ARCHITECTURE USING TLM 2.0.1

Abstract

Networks on Chip (NoCs) are commonly used to integrate complex embedded systems and multiprocessor platforms due to their scalability and versatility. Modeling tools used at the functional level use SystemC to perform hardware–software co-design and error correction concurrently, thus, reducing time to market. This work analyzes a JPEG encoding algorithm mapped onto a configurable M × N, mesh/torus, NoC platform described in SystemC with the transaction level modeling (TLM) standard; timing constraints for both, the router and network interface controller, are assigned according to a hardware description language (HDL) model written for this purpose. Processing nodes are also described as SystemC threads and their computation delays are assigned depending on the amount and cost of the operations they perform. The programming model employed is message passing. We start by describing and profiling the JPEG algorithm as a task graph; then, four partitioning proposals are mapped onto three NoCs of different size. Our analysis comprises changes in topology, virtual channel depth, routing algorithms, network speed and task-node assignments. Through several high-level simulations we evaluate the impact of each parameter and we show that, for the proposed model, most improvements come from the algorithm partitioning.