Homogeneous Specifications for Platform – HOSPI

In the context of high end mobile appliances for the multimedia and telecom market, the use of ad-hoc accelerators for both computation and communication is absolutely necessary due to the power efficiency requirements. Considering a platform as a configurable SW and HW environment, the HOSPI project focuses on the definition and implementation of a practical approach to perform rapid and optimized deployment and integration of application specifications on a configurable platform.
The objective of the HOSPI project is to define innovative methods, and implement the associated tools, to ease the mapping of data-streaming applications on heterogeneous platforms. From a practical point of view, it implies to reduce the gap that exists between the application description, i.e. high level specification that does not make any assumption on the implementation, and the platform description, that includes pieces of hardware and pieces of software to support the actual implementation. We propose a 3 steps process: a) use a general-purpose environment to describe and parallelize the application. This environment will be based on Process Networks (PN) to express the coarse grain parallelism of the application, b) provide an abstract view of the platform, both on communications and computations sides, based on an XML view. The target formalism will be inspired from the existing IP-XACT schema, but will require many still to be identified add-ons to express the platform capabilities and parameters, and c) define relationships between these two views in order to automate the way the application can be mapped from its PN representation onto the HW platform. These relationships will be used to express the mapping choices, and be supported by tools to automate the generation (or parameterization) of the HW and SW.
The approach proposed in the HOSPI project requires abstracting the relevant information from both the specification and the target platform. In that sense, it necessitates the application to express more concretely its computation and communication behavior, and the platform to provide in a clear way its capabilities. Using these abstracted views, performing the mapping of the application on the platform and generating all the required configuration files for hardware and software production tools can be automated, leaving the design decisions in the hands of the system integrator.