The Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) is a novel multi-core microprocessor designed to provide high-performance processing capabilities for a wide range of applications. In this paper, we describe the world's first JPEG 2000 and Motion JPEG 2000 encoder on Cell/B.E. Novel parallelization techniques for a Motion JPEG 2000 encoder that unleash the performance of the Cell/B.E. are proposed. Our Motion JPEG 2000 encoder consists of multiple video frame encoding servers on a cluster system for high-level parallelization. Each video frame encoding server runs on a heterogeneous multi-core Cell/B.E. processor, and utilizes its 8 Synergistic Processor Elements (SPEs) for low-level parallelization of the time consuming parts of the JPEG 2000 encoding process, such as the wavelet transform, the bit modeling, and the arithmetic coding. The effectiveness of high-level parallelization by the cluster system is also described, not only for the parallel encoding, but also for scalable performance improvement for real-time encoding and future enhancements. We developed all of the code from scratch for effective multilevel parallelization. Our results show that the Cell/B.E. is extremely efficient for this workload compared with commercially available processors, and thus we conclude that the Cell/B.E. is quite suitable for encoding next generation large pixel formats, such as 4K/2K-Digital Cinema.

The cell broadband engine (CBE) is a novel multi-core microprocessor designed to provide compact and high-performance processing capabilities for a wide range of applications. Real-time image processing applications with parallelism for large amounts of data are good examples to demonstrate the unique capabilities of the CBE. In this paper, we describe the evaluation of the performance for image processing using wavelet transforms on CBE. Our results show that the CBE is extremely efficient in this processing compared with commercially available processors, and thus, we conclude that the CBE is quite suitable for next generation large pixel formats, such as 4K/2K-digital cinema