Parallel MP3 Encoding
Credits

I added the code to the top-level section of the code to compute MP3 packets in parallel. How do I know about these things? I'm a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at the University of Notre Dame. My research has to do with infrastructure for parallel comptuing. I was a chapter author in the MPI-2 standard, and I maintain a high-quality freeware implementation of the MPI standard (LAM/MPI).

So I generally know a few things about parallel computing. This seemed like a fun and fairly easy project to do (don't they always?). It raises a surprising number of issues about parallel computing, which makes it an excellent teaching tool. It also seemed a like a good way to bring parallelization to the masses -- while parallel computing is frequently used in high performance computing and scientific number-crunching applications, few "normal" people even know what it is. Parallelizing an existing, well-respected MP3 encoder and making it available seemed like a good idea.

Additionally, no one seems to have had this idea yet. I saw a project on Freshmeat that used PVM with BladeEnc, but it wasn't true parallelism -- it just farmed multiple instances of BladeEnc out to multiple machines (or "embarrissing parallelism"). I wanted a better solution.

This parallel encoder uses a "master / slave" paradigm to perform its work. See the technical details page for information on how it works.

Questions, comments, and suggestions are welcome. E-mail and comments should be sent to the BladeEnc developer list.