Live Demonstration: Multi-Laptop HEVC Encoding

Abstract

This paper presents a demonstration setup for distributed real-time HEVC encoding on a multi-computer system. The demonstrated multi-level parallelization scheme is implemented in the practical Kvazaar open-source HEVC encoder. It allows Kvazaar to exploit parallelism at three levels: 1) Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) optimized coding tools at the data level; 2) Wavefront Parallel Processing (WPP) and Overlapped Wavefront (OWF) parallelization strategies at the thread level; and 3) distributed slice encoding on multi-computer systems at the process level. This interactive demonstration allows visitors to gradually increase the degree of parallelism in Kvazaar and see the benefits of parallelization in live HEVC encoding. Exploiting all three levels of parallelism on a three-laptop setup speeds up Kvazaar by almost 21× over a non-parallelized single-core implementation of Kvazaar.