The Journal of China Universities of Posts and Telecommunications ›› 2019, Vol. 26 ›› Issue (5): 60-71.doi: 10.19682/j.cnki.1005-8885.2019.0031

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Performance Characterization of Illumination Algorithms for Reconfigurable Graphics Processor

Deng Junyong1, Liu Yang1, Xie Xiaoyan2   

  • Received:2019-01-03 Revised:2019-07-30 Online:2019-10-31 Published:2019-11-06
  • Supported by:
    National Natural Science Foundation of China

Abstract: aphics processing is an increasing important application domain with the demand of real-time rendering, video streaming, virtual reality, and so on. Illumination is a critical module in graphics rendering and is typically compute-bound, memory-bound, and power-bound in different application cases. It is crucial to decide how to schedule different illumination algorithms with different features according to the practical requirements in reconfigurable graphics hardware. This paper analyze the performance characteristics of four main-stream lighting algorithms, Lambert illumination algorithm, Phong illumination algorithm, Blinn-Phong illumination algorithm, and Cook-Torrance illumination algorithm, using hardware performance counters on x86 processor platform KabyLake (KBL). The data movement, computation, power consumption, and memory accessing are evaluated over a range of application scenarios. Further, by analyzing the system-level behavior of these illumination algorithms, obtains the cons and pros of these specific algorithms were obtained. The associated relationship between performance/energy and the evaluated metrics was analyzed through Pearson correlation coefficient(PCC)analysis. According to these performance characterization data, this paper presents some reconfiguration suggestions in reconfigurable graphics processor.

Key words: Performance characterization, Illumination algorithms, reconfigurable graphics processor, correlation analysis, computer architecture