Section: New Results

Raster Image Processing (RIP) Optimization

Participants : Cédric Bastoul, Paul Godard, Vincent Loechner.

In the context of our collaboration with the Caldera company, we are interested in original challenges for the computer systems in charge of driving very wide printer farms and very fast digital presses.

We explored new approaches inspired by the high performance computing field to speedup the graphics processing (RIP) necessary to digital printing. To achieve this goal, we developed a distributed system which provides the adequate flexibility and performance by exploiting and optimizing both processing and synchronization techniques. Our architecture meets the specific constraints on generating streams for printing purpose. We performed an evaluation of our solution and provided experimental evidence of its great performance and viability. This work has been presented at the 2019 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshop (IPDPSW): PDSEC '19, in May 2019, Rio de Janeiro.

The second topic we worked on during this collaboration is an out-of-core and out-of-place rectangular matrix transposition and rotation algorithm. An originality of our processing algorithm is to rely on an optimized use of the page cache mechanism. It is parallel, optimized by several levels of tiling and independent of any disk block size. We evaluated our approach on four common storage configurations: HDD, hybrid HDD-SSD, SSD and software RAID 0 of several SSDs. We showed that it brings significant performance improvement over a hand-tuned optimized reference implementation developed by the Caldera company and we confront it against the roofline speed of a straight file copy. This work is under submission in the IEEE Transaction on Computers.

Paul Godard has defended his PhD thesis on Dec. 16th, 2019.