An extensible framework for fast prototyping of multiprocessor dataflow applications

As the number of cores continues to grow in both digital signal and general purpose processors, tools which perform automatic scheduling from model-based designs are of increasing interest. CAL is a new actor/dataflow oriented language that aims at helping the programmer to express the concurrency and parallelism that are very important aspects of embedded system design as we enter in the multicore era. The design framework is composed by the OpenDF simulation platform, by Cal2C and CAL2HDL code generators and by a multiprocessor scheduling tool called PREESM. Yet in this paper, a subset of CAL is used to describe the application such that the application is SDF. This SDF graph is one starting point of the workflow of PREESM (composed of several plug-ins) to be prototyped/distributed/scheduled over an IP-XACT multiprocessor platform description. The PREESM automatic scheduling consists in statically distributing the tasks that constitute an application between available cores in a multi-core architecture in order to minimize the final latency. This problem has been proven to be NP-complete. An IDCT 2D example will be used as test case of the full framework.