No abstract

High-performance mediaprocessors that aim at high-level language programming without sacrificing much would be very desirable in many applications including medical imaging. Media Accelerated Processor (MAP) 1000 that is jointly being developed by Hitachi, Ltd. and Equator Technologies, Inc. is one of such next-generation mediaprocessors. We present the two main issues in programming these mediaprocessors, i.e., using C intrinsics (hinting to the compiler a desired assembly language instruction in a C program so that the compiler tries to use the hinted instruction in the compiled code) and data flow control, which still requires a high degree of expertise in the detailed architectural features including many low-level instructions, handling input/output data transfers, and in-depth understanding of the algorithm. To ease the programming burden and allow flexible and efficient deployment of the MAP-based target systems, we have developed the MAP University of Washington Image Computing Library (UWICL) for the MAP1000. Currently, it consists of 105 functions. The UWICL functions effectively decouple the data flow control and data processing in a flexible two-layered software structure, where the upper layer is responsible for the data transfer between on-chip cache and off-chip memory by utilizing the on-chip DMA controller in a double-buffering scheme and the lower layer performs the data processing. This hierarchy allows the flexibility to use the UWICL modules depending on how the application is implemented and/or the level of user's experience in programming the MAP1000 mediaprocessor.