Heterogeneous Managed Runtime Systems: A Computer Vision Case Study

Real-time 3D space understanding is becoming prevalent across a wide range of applications and hardware platforms. To meet the desired Quality of Service (QoS), computer vision applications tend to be heavily parallelized and exploit any available hardware accelerators. Current approaches to achieving real-time computer vision, evolve around programming languages typically associated with High Performance Computing along with binding extensions for OpenCL or CUDA execution. Such implementations, although high performing, lack portability across the wide range of diverse hardware resources and accelerators. In this paper, we showcase how a complex computer vision application can be implemented within a managed runtime system. We discuss the complexities of achieving high-performing and portable execution across embedded and desktop configurations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that it is possible to achieve the QoS target of over 30 frames per second (FPS) by exploiting FPGA and GPGPU acceleration transparently through the managed runtime system.