High-level architecture modeling and exploration for streaming applications

Multi and many core platforms are increasingly employed today to cope with the demands of modern multimedia, networking and other similar streaming applications. Selecting the best architecture for a set of such applications is complex, and without coding for each specific system, the choice is made based on designer experience. In this paper we use CAL, a dataflow language for specifying streaming applications, to model both the software and generic hardware platforms. The hardware model is combined with the mapped application in a high-level unified model, which is simulated to obtain performance estimates, intended to give feedback during design space exploration.