Designing applications for heterogeneous many-core architectures with the FlexTiles Platform

The FlexTiles Platform has been developed within a Seventh Framework Programme project which is co-funded by the European Union with ten participants of five countries. It aims to create a self-adaptive heterogeneous many-core architecture which is able to dynamically manage load balancing, power consumption and faulty modules. Its focus is to make the architecture efficient and to keep programming effort low. Therefore, the concept contains a dedicated automated tool-flow for creating both the hardware and the software, a simulation platform that can execute the same binaries as the FPGA prototype and a virtualization layer to manage the final heterogeneous many-core architecture for run-time adaptability. With this approach software development productivity can be increased and thus, the time-to-market and development costs can be decreased. In this paper we present the FlexTiles Development Platform with a many-core architecture demonstration. The steps to implement, validate and integrate two use-cases are discussed.