Component-based development of embedded systems with GPUs

Abstract

One pressing challenge of many modern embedded systems is to successfully deal with the considerable amount of data that originates from the interaction with the environment. A recent solution comes from the use of GPUs, providing a significantly improved performance for data-parallel applications. Another trend in the embedded systems domain is component-based development. However, existing component-based approaches lack specific support to develop embedded systems with GPUs. As a result, components with GPU capability need to encapsulate all the required GPU information, leading to component specialization to specific platforms, hence drastically impeding component reusability.To facilitate component-based development of embedded systems with GPUs, we introduce the concept of flexible components. This increases the design flexibility by allowing the system developer to decide component allocation (i.e., either the CPU or GPU) at a later stage of the system development, with no change to the component implementation. Furthermore, we provide means to automatically generate code for adapting flexible components corresponding to their hardware placement, as well as code for component communication. Through the introduced support, components with GPU capability are platform-independent, and can be executed, without manual adjustment, on a large variety of hardware (i.e., platforms with different GPU characteristics).