Performance Analysis of Multimedia Retrieval Workloads Running on Multicores.

Multimedia data has become a major data type in the Big Data era. The explosive volume of such data and the increasing real-time requirement to retrieve useful information from it have put significant pressure in processing such data in a timely fashion. However, while prior efforts have done in-depth analysis on architectural characteristics of traditional multimedia processing and text-based retrieval algorithms, there has been no systematic study towards the emerging multimedia retrieval applications. This may impede the architecture design and system evaluation of these applications. In this paper, we make the first attempt to construct a multimedia retrieval benchmark suite (MMRBench for short) that can be used to evaluate architectures and system designs for multimedia retrieval applications. MMRBench covers modern multimedia retrieval algorithms with different versions (sequential, parallel and distributed). MMRBench also provides a series of flexible interfaces as well as certain automation tools. With such a flexible design, the algorithms in MMRBench can be used both in individual kernel-level evaluation and in integration to form a complete multimedia data retrieval infrastructure for full system evaluation. Furthermore, we use performance counters to analyze a set of architecture characteristics of multimedia retrieval algorithms in MMRBench, including the characteristics of core level, chip level and inter-chip level. The study shows that micro-architecture design in current processor is inefficient (both in performance and power) for these multimedia retrieval workloads, especially in core resources and memory systems. We then derive some insights into the architecture design and system evaluation for such multimedia retrieval algorithms.