Membrane-based design and management methodology for parallel dynamically reconfigurable embedded systems

Partial and dynamic reconfiguration provides a relevant new dimension to design efficient parallel embedded systems. However, due to the encasing complexity of such systems, ensuring the consistency and parallelism management at runtime is still a key challenge. So architecture models and design methodology are required to allow for efficient component reuse and hardware reconfiguration management. This paper presents a distributed persistence management model and its implementation for reconfigurable multiprocessor systems on dynamically reconfigurable circuits. The proposed approach is inspired from the well-known component based models used in software applications development. Our model is based on membranes wrapping the systems components. The objective is to improve design productivity and ensure consistency by managing context switching and storage using modular distributed hardware controllers. These membranes are distributed and optimized with the aim to design self-adaptive systems by allowing dynamic changes in parallelism degree and contexts migration. Simulation and synthesis results are given to show performances and effectiveness of our methodology.