System-level design for communication-centric task farm applications

Massively parallel applications such as telecommunication and video streaming have the particularity that a large proportion of the time is spent on accessing communication channels between the tasks, due to contention on the on-chip interconnect. Moreover, the analysis of a given task deployment is often fastidious. Thus, we propose to extend an existing easy-to-use System-level Design methodology to task farm applications. The contribution first concerns adding relevant SysML modeling elements to take into account application code, hardware platforms and deployment constraints. Secondly, new modeling elements — including access techniques to communication channels — must be given a semantics in order to transform models into a well-defined SystemC virtual prototyping MPSoC platform. A telecommunication application serves as an example.