Occam-pi for programming of massively parallel reconfigurable architectures

  • Authors:
  • Zain-ul-Abdin Zain-ul-Abdin;Bertil Svensson

  • Affiliations:
  • Centre for Research on Embedded Systems, Halmstad University, Halmstad, Sweden;Centre for Research on Embedded Systems, Halmstad University, Halmstad, Sweden

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Massively parallel reconfigurable architectures, which offer massive parallelism coupled with the capability of undergoing run-time reconfiguration, are gaining attention in order to meet the increased computational demands of high-performance embedded systems. We propose that the occam-pi language is used for programming of the category of massively parallel reconfigurable architectures. The salient properties of the occam-pi language are explicit concurrency with built-in mechanisms for interprocessor communication, provision for expressing dynamic parallelism, support for the expression of dynamic reconfigurations, and placement attributes. To evaluate the programming approach, a compiler framework was extended to support the language extensions in the occam-pi language and a backend was developed to target the Ambric array of processors. We present two case-studies; DCT implementation exploiting the reconfigurability feature of occam-pi and a significantly large autofocus criterion calculation based on the dynamic parallelism capability of the occam-pi language. The results of the implemented case studies suggest that the occam-pi-language-based approach simplifies the development of applications employing run-time reconfigurable devices without compromising the performance benefits.