Image Processing Memtrace: Memory Profiling Tool

Memory Access and Timing Analysis for Optimizing Embedded System Software

Modern multimedia applications, e.g. MPEG-4 or H.264/AVC video codecs, require a high amount of computational power and memory space. Mobile terminals, such as PDAs or cellular video phones, are built around embedded processors, which underlie severe restrictions concerning computing power and memory usage. In conjunction with hardware/SIMD accelerators these processors fulfill the arithmetic requirements of current multimedia applications. The major problems concerning performance and power consumption emerges from the huge amount of data to be transferred in these applications. In order to reduce the overall data traffic, the data transfer intensive parts of the code have to be identified and optimized. This requires detailed memory accesses and timing information about the software. Since multimedia software contains up to 100.000 lines of code, tools are required, which help the designer to achieve this information and thus to identify the critical code parts.

In order to achieve a fast and accurate solution for such a tool, the Heinrich-Hertz-Institut developed a profiler, called memtrace, which is based on a cycle-accurate instruction set simulator. Memtrace provides the designer with detailed information on timing and memory accesses for each function and variable  in the software code. This information aids the designer with finding the data/timing intensive hot-spots (functions/variables) in the code and with choosing the appropriate optimization.

Publications

Heiko Hübert, Benno Stabernack, Kai-Immo Wels, "Performance and Memory Profiling for Embedded System Design", Proc. IEEE Second International Symposium on Industrial Embedded Systems (SIES 2007), Lisbon, Portugal, July 2007 
 
Heiko Hübert, Benno Stabernack, Henryk Richter, "Tool-Aided Performance Analysis and Optimization of Multimedia Applications", Second Workshop on Embedded Systems for Real-Time Multimedia (ESTIMedia 2004), Stockholm, Sweden, September 2004 
 
Heiko Hübert, Benno Stabernack, Henryk Richter, "Tool-Aided Performance Analysis and Optimization of an H.264 Decoder for Embedded Systems", The Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Consumer Electronics (ISCE 2004), Reading, England, September 2004