pn: A Tool for Improved Derivation of Process Networks

Current emerging embedded System-on-Chip platforms are increasingly becoming multiprocessor architectures. System designers experience significant difficulties in programming these platforms. The applications are typically specified as sequential programs that do not reveal the available parallelism in an application, thereby hindering the efficient mapping of an application onto a parallel multiprocessor platform. In this paper, we present our compiler techniques for facilitating the migration from a sequential application specification to a parallel application specification using the process network model of computation. Our work is inspired by a previous research project called Compaan. With our techniques we address optimization issues such as the generation of process networks with simplified topology and communication without sacrificing the process networks' performance. Moreover, we describe a technique for compile-time memory requirement estimation which we consider as an important contribution of this paper. We demonstrate the usefulness of our techniques on several examples.

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