Scalable parallel motion estimation on muti-GPU system

With NVIDIA's parallel computing architecture CUDA, using GPU to speed up compute-intensive applications has become a research focus in recent years. In this paper, we proposed a scalable method for multi-GPU system to accelerate motion estimation algorithm, which is the most time consuming process in video encoding. Based on the analysis of data dependency and multi-GPU architecture, a parallel computing model and a communication model are designed. We tested our parallel algorithm and analyzed the performance with 10 standard video sequences in different resolutions using 4 NVIDIA GTX460 GPUs, and calculated the overall speedup. Our results show that a speedup of 36.1 times using 1 GPU and more than 120 times for 4 GPUs on 1920×1080 sequences. Further, our parallel algorithm demonstrated the potential of nearly linear speedup according to the number of GPUs in the system. © 2013 Trans Tech Publications Ltd, Switzerland.