Towards the optimal execution of Renderscript applications in Android devices

Abstract Handheld systems (smartphones, tablets, …) are becoming highly used devices with an important market share. The underlying technology supporting them, is contributing with a significant increase of the computational capability on each new generation. The Android Ecosystem provides a development framework guaranteeing the portability of code over a wide range of platforms. However, the efficient use of such devices is a permanent challenge due to their heterogeneous nature and to the increasing computational demand of the end-user applications. We address the problem of the portability of efficiency trying to ensure also that the code will run efficiently across the different platforms. We propose a method that allows to derive an analytical model to obtain parameters for optimal executions of parallel Renderscript codes. The model has been successfully validated over a wide range of benchmark applications. The simplicity of the model makes it susceptible of being introduced into the Android Ecosystem so that the portability of the efficiency is also guaranteed.