Measuring the Performance of Multimedia Instruction Sets

Speaker:	Prof. Alan Jay Smith
		Computer Science Division
		UC Berkeley
		USA

Title:		"Measuring the Performance of Multimedia
		 Instruction Sets"

Date:		Monday, 16 January 2006

Time:		11:00am - 12 noon

Venue:		Lecture Theatre F
		(Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theatre,near lift nos.25/26)
		HKUST

Abstract:

Many microprocessor instruction sets include instructions
for accelerating multimedia applications such as DVD playback, speech
recognition and 3D graphics. Despite general agreement on the need to
support this emerging workload, there are considerable differences between
the instruction sets that have been designed to do so.  In this talk, we
present a study of the performance of five instruction sets on kernels
extracted from a broad multimedia workload.  Each kernel was recoded in
the assembly language of the five multimedia extensions.  We compare the
performance of each extension against other architectures as well as to
the original compiled C performance.  From our analysis we determine how
well multimedia workloads map to current architectures, what was useful
and what was not. We also propose two enhancements to current
architectures: strided memory operations, and superwide registers.

Work done with Nathan Slingerland



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Biography:

Alan Jay Smith received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the
M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Stanford University,
Stanford, California.  He was an NSF Graduate Fellow. He is currently a
Professor in the Computer Science Division of the Department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley,
California, USA, where he has been on the faculty since 1974; he was vice
chairman of the EECS department from July, 1982 to June, 1984.  His
research interests include the analysis and modeling of computer systems
and devices, computer architecture, and operating systems.

Dr. Smith is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic
Engineers, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a Fellow
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of
IFIP Working Group 7.3, the Computer Measurement Group, Eta Kappa Nu, Tau
Beta Pi and Sigma Xi.  In 2003, he received the A. A. Michelson Award from
the Computer Measurement Group (CMG).  The award is given as a lifetime
achievement award for making significant, lasting contributions to the
field of computer measurement and performance. He was awarded the 2006
Harry Goode Award of the IEEE Computer Society, for outstanding
contributions to the information processing field; the citation reads:
"For leadership in the measurement and evaluation of cache and memory
system performance."  He was on the Board of Directors (1993-2003), and
was Chairman (1991-93) of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer
Architecture (SIGARCH), was Chairman (1983-87) of the ACM Special Interest
Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS), was on the Board of Directors
(1985-89) of the ACM Special Interest Group on Measurement and Evaluation
(SIGMETRICS), was an ACM National Lecturer (1985-6) and an IEEE
Distinguished Visitor (1986-7), was an Associate Editor of the ACM
Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS) (1982-93), is a subject area
editor of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing and was on the
editorial board of the Journal of Microprocessors and Microsystems
(1988-2005).  He was program chairman for the Sigmetrics '89 / Performance
'89 Conference, program co-chair for the Second (1990) Sixth (1994), Ninth
(1997) and Seventeenth (2005) Hot Chips Conferences, currently chairs the
Hot Chips steering committee and has served on numerous program
committees.