Communication-Aware Hierarchical Online-Placement in Heterogeneous Reconfigurable Systems

In recent years, there was a tendency towards heterogeneous systems. The main property of these systems is that communication resources and computation resources are non-uniform in architecture and performance. Often,communication links between physically close infrastructure nodes provide high performance, e.g. in the sense of low latency or high bandwidth. A placement methodology for such systems should minimise the overall communication costs and prevent blocking of long, low-performanced communication links. Therefore application components with higher communication demands should be located closer to each other. For this, we propose a placement methodology that is based on a hierarchical application and infrastructure description. Due to our hierarchical approach, no knowledge about the potentially complex semantics of multi-dimensional communication demands is needed for the optimisation during the run-time of the placement. Our implementation shows a simple but efficient online-placement which also leads to a higher robustness in distributed embedded systems.