Custom Simulator

Custom Simulator is a collection of scripts developed to read memory traces generated by HEVC and VVC Test Models (HM and VTM, respectively), extract the information and plot graphs displaying the results.

Results

Overall memory profiling

The overall memory profiling was performed using the Intel® VTune™ Amplifier profiling tool to monitor the volume of memory loads (read accesses) and stores (write accesses) of each module.

Memory accesses profiling per encoding module

Inter-prediction specific memory analysis

The inter-frame prediction is the most resource-intensive operation in both HEVC and VVC encoders. Considering this, a specific analysis was performed as a way to measure the increased VVC memory requirements in comparison with HEVC. The HM and VTM software applications were extended to generate memory trace files detailing the accesses to the candidate blocks and their required volume of fetched data.

Inter-prediction overall memory accesses

Inter-prediction memory accesses per CU size

Absolute memory accesses per CU size

Block sizes adopted during inter-prediction encoding

Parameters

The parameters used for the analysis can be found in custom_simulator.py.

The default values are:

# Parameters
FRAMES = '17'
SEARCH_RANGE = ['96']
QP = ['32']

Instructions

The instructions on how to run the scripts are available in this repository.

Links

• Memory Assesment Of Versatile Video Coding (ICIP 2020 Paper)
• Evaluation of Memory Requirements in VVC Encoders (SIM 2020 Presentation)