Energy-efficient acceleration of MPEG-4 compression tools

We propose novel hardware accelerator architectures for the most computationally demanding algorithms of the MPEG-4 video compression standard-motion estimation, binary motion estimation (for shape coding), and the forward/inverse discrete cosine transforms (incorporating shape adaptive modes). These accelerators have been designed using general low-energy design philosophies at the algorithmic/architectural abstraction levels. The themes of these philosophies are avoiding waste and trading area/performance for power and energy gains. Each core has been synthesised targeting TSMC 0.09 μm TCBN90LP technology, and the experimental results presented in this paper show that the proposed cores improve upon the prior art

Fast, Small and Exact: Infinite-order Language Modelling with Compressed Suffix Trees

Efficient methods for storing and querying are critical for scaling high-order n-gram language models to large corpora. We propose a language model based on compressed suffix trees, a representation that is highly compact and can be easily held in memory, while supporting queries needed in computing language model probabilities on-the-fly. We present several optimisations which improve query runtimes up to 2500x, despite only incurring a modest increase in construction time and memory usage. For large corpora and high Markov orders, our method is highly competitive with the state-of-the-art KenLM package. It imposes much lower memory requirements, often by orders of magnitude, and has runtimes that are either similar (for training) or comparable (for querying).Comment: 14 pages in Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) 201

A Benchmark Framework for Data Compression Techniques

Lightweight data compression is frequently applied in main memory database systems to improve query performance. The data processed by such systems is highly diverse. Moreover, there is a high number of existing lightweight compression techniques. Therefore, choosing the optimal technique for a given dataset is non-trivial. Existing approaches are based on simple rules, which do not suffice for such a complex decision. In contrast, our vision is a cost-based approach. However, this requires a detailed cost model, which can only be obtained from a systematic benchmarking of many compression algorithms on many different datasets. A naïve benchmark evaluates every algorithm under consideration separately. This yields many redundant steps and is thus inefficient. We propose an efficient and extensible benchmark framework for compression techniques. Given an ensemble of algorithms, it minimizes the overall run time of the evaluation. We experimentally show that our approach outperforms the naïve approach