Development of General-Purpose Processing Element and Network-Based Dataflow Processing System: Part One

This research concerns a system, which is called Ubiquitous Multi-Processor (UMP) system, which constructs dataflow network dynamically by connecting function-specific execution modules. The software model of the system was developed consisting only of application-specific execution modules (SS-PE) providing fixed functions. We developed a general-purpose execution module (GP-PE) which performs equivalent function to SS-PE by downloading the software library to improve the efficiency of development and reconfigure the function dynamically. The GP-PE was evaluated on the loading time of the library, the processing time of a color space conversion application, and the configuration time of processing on a network. The results of evaluation show that the GP-PE achieves equivalent performance to the SS-PE. Furthermore, the GP-PE does not degrade the system performance regarding dynamic system configuration if the library becomes hundreds of megabytes. This result shows that the GP-PE is suitable for the UMP system in general use.