A Scalable Multiprocessor for Real-Time Signal Processing

Multimedia applications that operate on data such as audio, video or graphical data are showing a growing need for processor power. To meet the required performance, often specialized processors and custom hardware architectures are used. Our goal was to design a scalable multiprocessor that is versatile enough to replace many of these custom solutions for applications that perform signal processing on multimedia data in real time. To achieve high overall performance, a scalable multiprocessor system requires an interconnection structure that offers high communication bandwidth. Further, to process data in real time, a suitable interconnection structure has to provide real-time or quality of service (QoS) guarantees when transmitting data. These requirements led us to the development of the Switcherland system [1, 2]. Switcherland uses a scalable interconnection structure based on switches and forms the basis of the work described here.