An extensible, maintainable and elegant approach to hardware source code generation in Reconfig-P

Abstract

Reconfig-P is a prototype hardware implementation for membrane computing applications. Currently there are two alternative designs for the implementation of P systems in Reconfig-P: the rule-oriented design and the region-oriented design. Driven by the goal of high performance, the rule-oriented design treats reaction rules as the primary computational entities and represents regions only implicitly. In contrast, the region-oriented design represents regions, rather than reaction rules, as the primary computational entities, and thereby more directly reflects the intuitive conceptual understanding of a P system and promotes the extensibility of Reconfig-P. To improve its practical usefulness and versatility, not only should Reconfig-P include both of the hardware designs, it should be maintainable and extensible so that it can easily and effectively incorporate new implementation strategies and implementations of additional types of P systems. To accomplish a seamless integration of the rule-oriented and region-oriented designs and other alternative implementation strategies in Reconfig-P, and to make Reconfig-P amenable to future integration of additional implementation strategies, we have developed a new version of P Builder, our intelligent hardware source code generator, in accordance with a novel design pattern called Content-Form-Strategy. In this paper, we describe the Content-Form-Strategy pattern and the implementation of the new version of P Builder.