An efficient load-balancing algorithm for image processing applications on multicore processors
Ahmed El-Mahdy, Hisham El‐Shishiny · 2008
The significance of load-balancing is rising with the increasing number of processing cores per chip. A fast load-balancer is sought to exploit fine grain parallelism possible with multicore processors. This paper focuses on load-balancing image processing applications where the amount of processing varies per pixel; such application domain includes high dynamic range imaging and fractal related applications. This paper formulates load-balancing, for such applications, as a curve fitting problem for statistically sampled work across the image. Such formulation allows for analytically determining an optimal load-balance partitioning, resulting in accurate, low-overhead load-balancing. Experiments using the proposed algorithm shows a remarkable performance of achieving around 90% of 'perfect' image partitioning for a complex fractal application.