EARLY EXPERIENCE WITH A HYBRID PROCESSOR: K-MEANS CLUSTERING
We discuss hardware/software coprocessing on a hybrid processor for a compute- and data-intensive hyper-spectral imaging algorithm, K-Means Clustering. The experiments are performed on the Altera Excalibur board using the soft IP core 32-bit NIOS RISC processor. In our experiments, we compare performance of the sequential algorithm with two different accelerated versions. We consider granularity and synchronization issues when mapping an algorithm to a hybrid processor. Our results show that on the Excalibur NIOS, a 15% speedup can be achieved over the sequential algorithm on images with 8 spectral bands where the pixels are divided into 8 categories. Speedup is limited by the communication cost of transferring data from external memory through the NIOS processor to the customized circuits. Our results indicate that future hybrid processors must either (1) have a clock rate 10X the speed of the configurable logic circuits or (2) include dual port memories that both the processor and configurable logic can access. If either of these conditions is met, the hybrid processor will show a factor of 10 speedup over the sequential algorithm. Such systems will combine the convenience of conventional processors with the speed of configurable logic.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- US Department of Energy (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-36
- OSTI ID:
- 774828
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-01-969; TRN: AH200121%%20
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Conference title not supplied, Conference location not supplied, Conference dates not supplied; Other Information: PBD: 1 Feb 2001
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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