The information technology of future is likely to be highly dependent on digital video. The key obstacle in realizing this technology, however, lies in the transmission, access and storage requirements of huge amount of data. Compression of a video sequence is an inevitable solution to overcome this obstacle. While various video compression standards have been proposed, their software implementations pose a formidable challenge due to their great deal of processing requirements. On the other hand, the hardware solutions may not be cost-effective. This thesis deals with parallel implementation of the MPEG-2 video encoder on various parallel and distributed platforms. We use a data-parallel approach and exploit parallelism within each frame, unlike some of the previous approaches that emp...[ Read more ]

The information technology of future is likely to be highly dependent on digital video. The key obstacle in realizing this technology, however, lies in the transmission, access and storage requirements of huge amount of data. Compression of a video sequence is an inevitable solution to overcome this obstacle. While various video compression standards have been proposed, their software implementations pose a formidable challenge due to their great deal of processing requirements. On the other hand, the hardware solutions may not be cost-effective. This thesis deals with parallel implementation of the MPEG-2 video encoder on various parallel and distributed platforms. We use a data-parallel approach and exploit parallelism within each frame, unlike some of the previous approaches that employ multiple processing of several disjoint video sequences. This makes our encoder suitable for real-time applications where the complete video sequence may not be present on the disk and may become available on a frame-by-frame basis with time. The encoder also provides control over various parameters, and has the flexibility to allow the inclusion of various algorithms for different stages of the codec. An encoding rate higher than 30 frames/set has been achieved on the Intel Paragon. The encoder is portable across various platforms and allows the user to control the granularity of the problem by enabling it to run on a few fast workstations in a coarse-grained fashion as well as on large scale massively parallel processors in a fine-grained fashion,