EAGER: Data-Mining Driven Power-Efficient Intelligent Memory Storage for Mobile Video Applications

North Dakota State University Fargo, Fargo ND

Investigators

Abstract

Mobile devices such as smart-phones and tablets have become the most important medium for delivering Internet traffic, especially multimedia content, to end users. One of the most popular multimedia applications is video streaming. During this process, video decoding has become the dominant energy-intensive application used in mobile devices. In particular, the major signal processing units in video decoders, such as motion estimation and compensation, forward and inverse discrete cosine transform, require a significant amount of calculations and frequent embedded memory accesses. It is understood that embedded SRAM consumes a large amount of power and limits battery life, and this situation is only expected to grow with the emerging popularity of high quality mobile video applications. This project proposes to address this problem by incorporating advanced data mining techniques particularly suited to mobile video data applications into the hardware design process to yield an intelligent memory having high power efficiency. The PIs will explore and characterize the behaviors of video data and provide a better-informed low power hardware design. The goal is to create new power efficient mobile video memory designs that utilize the identified characteristics extracted by suitable data-mining techniques tailored to video data, which will serve as a core foundation to bring about drastic improvements in energy efficiency. The exploration of these intelligent low power techniques through the interaction of both hardware and software viewpoints will enable a new dimension for power savings. The success of this project will have a huge impact on the mobile computing community, architecture community, and everyday life. This project will also serve as an excellent educational platform to improve the understanding of green computing amongst future computer scientists and computer engineers. The PIs will jointly develop course modules focusing on software/hardware co-design for mobile devices, which can be integrated into a variety of different courses. The PIs will also continue to recruit underrepresented students, such as females and minorities, to participate in this project.