Abstract
The new generation of multicore processors and reconfigurable hardware platforms provides a dramatic increase of the available parallelism and processing capabilities. However, one obstacle for exploiting all the promises of such platforms is deeply rooted in sequential thinking. The sequential programming model does not naturally expose potential parallelism that effectively permits to build parallel applications that can be efficiently mapped on different kind of platforms. A shift of paradigm is necessary at all levels of application development to yield portable and scalable implementations on the widest range of heterogeneous platforms. This paper presents a design flow for the hardware and software synthesis of heterogeneous systems allowing to automatically generate hardware and software components as well as appropriate interfaces, from a unique high‐level description of the application, based on the dataflow paradigm, running onto heterogeneous architectures composed by reconfigurable hardware units and multicore processors. Experimental results based on the implementation of several video coding algorithms onto heterogeneous platforms are also provided to show the effectiveness of the approach both in terms of portability and scalability.
Highlights
Parallelism is becoming more and more a necessary property for implementations running on nowadays computing platforms including multicore processors and FPGA units
The work presented in this paper focuses in particular on a methodology for the generation of scalable parallel applications that provide a high degree of portability onto a wide range of heterogeneous platforms
We use an extension of the dataflow process network model (DPN), which is closely related to Kahn process networks (KPNs), that enables to express a large class of applications, where processes, named actors, are written using a formal domain-specific language with the useful property of preserving a high degree of analyzability [10]
Summary
Parallelism is becoming more and more a necessary property for implementations running on nowadays computing platforms including multicore processors and FPGA units. One of the main obstacles that may prevent the efficient usage of heterogeneous platforms is the fact that the traditional sequential specification formalisms and all existing software and IPs, legacy of several years of the continuous successes of the sequential processor architectures, are not the most appropriate starting point to program such parallel platforms [1]. Such specifications are no more appropriate as unified specifications when targeting both processors and reconfigurable hardware components. The following sections present the main stages of a dataflow-based approach that present the described features in the design of applications on heterogeneous platforms
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