Multithreaded Translation of Ptolemy II Designs on Multicore Platforms

Ptolemy II is an open source environment for system design and test based on component data flow. This paradigm tries to make parallel systems more deterministic and understandable. In this work we propose a technique to translate designs developed with Ptolemy II, into multithreaded Java implementations on multicore platforms. We have chosen Java mainly because Ptolemy II is implemented in Java and then we get direct code reuse. The counterpart is a certain amount of overhead that we expect to be less relevant as Java runtime environment will evolve. The main goals are to produce efficient parallel simulators and software devices with competitive performance level. We show by means of an example that the first goal is easy to achieve. The application context that we are interested on is video codec design suitable for wireless networks with variable bandwidth and noise constraints.