A parallel Reed-Solomon decoder on the imagine stream processor

Abstract

The increasing gap between processor and memory speeds is a well-known problem in modern computer architecture. Imagine stream architecture can solve bandwidth bottleneck by its particular memory hierarchy and stream processing for computationally intensive applications. Good performance has been demonstrated on media processing and partial scientific computing domains. Reed-Solomon (RS) codes are powerful block codes widely used as an error correction method. RS decoding demands a high memory bandwidth and intensive ALUs because of complex and special processing (galois field arithmetic), and real time requirement. People usually use specialized processor or DSP to solve it that gains high performance but lacks flexibility. This paper presents a software implementation of a parallel Reed-Solomon decoder on the Imagine platform. The implementation requires complex stream programming since the memory hierarchy and cluster organization of the underlying architecture are exposed to the Imagine programmer. Results demonstrate that Imagine has comparable performance to TI C64x. This work is an ongoing effort to validate the stream architecture is efficient and makes contribution to extend the application domain. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.