Dataflow Programming for Systems Design Space Exploration for Multicore Platforms

Nowadays processing systems are asked to support increasing complex and demanding high-performance applications, especially in the signal processing and video processing domains. The design of these systems are becoming extremely challenging because of several factors. Among them the most relevant are: The advent of the parallel era The sequential general purpose processor era during which performance increased more than two-fold every year, is definitely over. There has been no further increase in leading edge processor performance for over five years now and all projects aimed at breaking the 4 GHz barrier have been canceled by the major processor manufacturers. So as to continue increasing the computing power of computer systems, manufacturers have to use several slower processing cores, while trying to minimize the power consumption. Sequential reference softwares are no longer adapted Up to now, sequential software have proven to be the winning approaches for exploiting the potential of each new generation of sequential processors. But the advent of the new parallel era changes the way systems are implemented and sequential reference software used as specification base are no longer appropriate starting points for designing complex systems. The increasing demanding functionality and performance In parallel with miniaturization and the necessity to handle severely resource-constrained implementation platforms, the functionality and complexity of large classes of systems continue to increase making them from many respects comparable to ordinary desktop personal computers. A mixture of different types of timing and quality constraints make overall system architecture design, resource allocation and scheduling more important and challenging topics than ever before. Additionally, the market asks companies to build efficient systems while using the minimum of resources as fast as possible. Due to the level of complexity reached by high-demanding digital systems, it is no longer reasonable to handle such systems at low levels of abstraction (e.g. VHDL/Verilog or C/C++). A solution to the problem is to higher the level of abstraction at which the design of such systems is performed. But for raising the level of abstraction, the need for portable parallelism is primordial so as to be able to implement all kind of systems on a wide range of target platforms. Thus, enabling portable parallelism should be a primordial requirement for the development of this level of abstraction and the associated methodology and tools. However, creating a new abstraction layer may incur in the risk of loosing contact with implementation details and accuracy necessary for achieving efficient implementations. This work focuses on tackling such problem by using the CAL data flow language as main abstraction at the basis of the design process. The attempt of solving such challenging problem consists in building an environment for enabling high level design space exploration of complex parallel application for seamless implementation on heterogeneous platforms using CAL. It includes the extraction of metrics (static analysis and profiling) with the intention to use them as a basis for partitioning and scheduling heuristics aiming at finding the most efficient partitions. It also implies developing methodologies for guiding designers in the optimization of the high level specifications. Finally, a holistic approach has been defined in form of a complete design flow starting from CAL specifications down to implementations. Where traditional approaches are faced to traverse, at each iteration of the design flow, all the levels of abstraction for testing a design solution, the use of CAL as an abstraction layer enables designers to separate clearly three domains of concerns that are made orthogonal: functionality, partitioning and implementation. The separation of these domains of concerns eases the design space exploration and leads to an increase in productivity in the design of complex systems. This work leads to the creation of several new design tools: (1) profiling tools which extracts metrics from CAL programs and (2) exploration tools which include partitioning and scheduling heuristics and performance evaluation. These tools have been implemented with the aim of guiding designers in the high level design space exploration of systems in order to achieve efficient implementation. A systematic methodology has been also elaborated and has been tested successfully on a real world applications. Thanks to the metrics extracted from the CAL program, the design bottlenecks of a MPEG-4 SP video decoder have been identified and removed at a high level of abstraction, leading to improvements up to 7 times faster implementation.