An Environment for Exploring Data-Driven Architectures

A wide range of reconfigurable coarse-grain architectures has been proposed in recent years, for an extensive set of applications. These architectures vary widely in the interconnectivity, number, granularity and complexity of the processing elements (PEs). The performance of a specific application usually depends heavily on the adequacy of the PEs to the particular tasks involved, but tools to efficiently experiment architectural features are lacking. This work proposes an environment for exploration and simulation of coarse-grain reconfigurable data-driven architectures. The proposed environment takes advantage of Java and XML technologies to enable a very efficient backend for experiments with different architectural trade-offs, from the array connectivity and topology to the granularity and complexity of each PE. For a proof of concept, we show results on implementing different versions of a FIR filter on a hexagonal data-driven array.