A Compilation- and Simulation-Oriented Architecture Description Language for Multicore Systems

Today´s reconfigurable multicore architectures become more and more complex. They consist of several processing units, not necessarily identical, different interconnecting modules, memories and possibly other components. Programming such kind of architectures requires deep knowledge of the underlying hardware and is thus very time consuming and error prone. On the other hand, automated tool chains that target multicore architectures are typically tailored to one specific architecture type and require a platform-specific programming model. Within the EU FP7 project Architecture oriented paraLlelization for high performance embedded Multicore systems using scilAb (ALMA) we address this shortcoming by a flexible tool chain featuring platform-independence on the architecture level as well as on the programming model. Thus, the tool chain is kept retarget able by using a novel architecture description language (ADL) for multiprocessor system on chip devices. Applications are expressed using the Scilab programming language allowing the end user to develop optimized programs without specific knowledge of the target architectures. Thereby, the ADL guides the code generation of the integrated tool flow through coarse- and fine grain parallelism extraction, parallel code optimizations and multicore simulations.