Parallel programming models for a multiprocessor SoC platform applied to networking and multimedia
Pierre G. Paulin, Chuck Pilkington, Michel Langevin, Essaid Bensoudane, D. Lyonnard, Olivier Benny, Bruno Lavigueur, David Lo, Giovanni Beltrame, Vincent Gagné, Gabriela Nicolescu · IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems · 2006
The MultiFlex system is an application-to-platform mapping tool that integrates heterogeneous parallel components-H/W or S/W- into a homogeneous platform programming environment. This leads to higher quality designs through encapsulation and abstraction. Two high-level parallel programming models are supported by the following MultiFlex platform mapping tools: a distributed system object component (DSOC) object-oriented message passing model and a symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) model using shared memory. We demonstrate the combined use of the MultiFlex multiprocessor mapping tools, supported by high-speed hardware-assisted messaging, context-switching, and dynamic scheduling using the StepNP demonstrator multiprocessor system-on-chip platform, for two representative applications: 1) an Internet traffic management application running at 2.5 Gb/s and 2) an MPEG4 video encoder (VGA resolution, at 30 frames/s). For these applications, a combination of the DSOC and SMP programming models were used in interoperable fashion. After optimization and mapping, processor utilization rates of 85%-91% were demonstrated for the traffic manager. For the MPEG4 decoder, the average processor utilization was 88%