Mapping of streaming applications considering alternative application specifications (Extended abstract)

Abstract

Streaming applications often require a parallel Model of Computation (MoC) to specify their application behavior and to facilitate mapping onto Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) platforms. Various performance requirements and resource budgets of embedded systems ask for an efficient design space exploration (DSE) approach to select the best design from a design space consisting of a large number of design choices. However, existing DSE approaches explore the design space that includes only architecture and mapping alternatives for an initial application specification given by the application designer. In this paper, we first show that a design often might not be optimal if alternative specifications of a given application are not taken into account. We further argue that the best alternative specification consists of only independent and load-balanced application tasks. Based on the Polyhedral Process Network (PPN) MoC, we present an approach to analyze and transform an initial PPN to an alternative one that contains only independent processes if possible. Finally, by prototyping real-life applications on both FPGA-based MPSoCs and desktop multi-core platforms, we demonstrate that mapping the alternative application specification results in a large performance gain compared to those approaches, in which alternative application specifications are not taken into account.