Occam-pi for Programming of Massively Parallel Reconfigurable Architectures

Massively parallel reconfigurable architectures, which offermassive parallelism coupled with the capability of undergoing run-time reconfiguration, are gaining attention in order to meetthe increased computational demands of high-performance embedded systems. We propose that the - language is used forprogramming of the category of massively parallel reconfigurable architectures. The salient properties of the - language areexplicit concurrency with built-in mechanisms for interprocessor communication, provision for expressing dynamic parallelism,support for the expression of dynamic reconfigurations, and placement attributes. To evaluate the programming approach, acompiler framework was extended to support the language extensions in the - language and a backend was developed to target the Ambric array of processors. We present two case-studies; DCT implementation exploiting the reconfigurability feature of- and a significantly large autofocus criterion calculation based on the dynamic parallelism capability of the- language. The results of the implemented case studies suggest that the --language-based approach simplifies thedevelopment of applications employing run-time reconfigurable devices without compromising the performance benefits