A new Petri net based model of data transfers in the PC workstation memory hierarchy for MPEG encoding

For MPEG encoding applications, data transfers in the memory hierarchy of current PC workstations is one of the main bottlenecks. In this paper we propose to model such transfers using Petri nets and to simulate the execution of MPEG encoding using a computer aided Petri Net based simulation tool. This model makes it possible to separate the processing and memory transfer times and to understand the influence of the different parameters characterizing the memory hierarchy on the total encoding time. Results show that only some key components in the memory subsystem need to be improved to get a very interesting data transfer speed up