Parallel LDPC Decoding on a Heterogeneous Platform using OpenCL

Modern mobile devices are equipped with various accelerated processing units to handle computationally intensive applications; therefore, Open Computing Language (OpenCL) has been proposed to fully take advantage of the computational power in heterogeneous systems. This article introduces a parallel software decoder of Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes on an embedded heterogeneous platform using an OpenCL framework. The LDPC code is one of the most popular and strongest error correcting codes for mobile communication systems. Each step of LDPC decoding has different parallelization characteristics. In the proposed LDPC decoder, steps suitable for task-level parallelization are executed on the multi-core central processing unit (CPU), and steps suitable for data-level parallelization are processed by the graphics processing unit (GPU). To improve the performance of OpenCL kernels for LDPC decoding operations, explicit thread scheduling, vectorization, and effective data transfer techniques are applied. The proposed LDPC decoder achieves high performance and high power efficiency by using heterogeneous multi-core processors on a unified computing framework. Keywords: Error correcting code, LDPC decoder, parallel processing, heterogeneous computing, OpenCL