Procedure cloning: a transformation for improved system-level functional partitioning

Functional partitioning assigns the functions of a system´s program-like specification among system components, such as standard-software and custom-hardware processors. We introduce a new transformation, called procedure cloning, that significantly improves functional partitioning results. The transformation creates a clone of a procedure for sole use by a particular procedure caller, so the clone can be assigned to the caller´s processor, which in turn improves performance through reduced communication. We define several cloning heuristics that seek to clone the minimum number of procedures, a goal necessary to obtain the best improvements. We highlight experiments comparing our cloning heuristics and showing partition improvements with cloning