The next generation of embedded software has high performance requirements and is increasingly dynamic. Multiple applications are typically sharing the system, running in parallel in different combinations, starting and stopping their individual execution at different moments in time. The different combinations of applications are forming system execution scenarios. In this paper, we present the distributed application layer, a scenario-based design flow for mapping a set of applications onto heterogeneous on-chip many-core systems. Applications are specified as Kahn process networks and the execution scenarios are combined into a finite state machine. Transitions between scenarios are triggered by behavioral events generated by either running applications or the run-time system. A set of optimal mappings are precalculated during design-time analysis. Later, at runtime, hierarchically organized controllers monitor behavioral events, and apply the precalculated mappings when starting new applications. To handle architectural failures, spare cores are allocated at design-time. At run-time, the controllers have the ability to move all processes assigned to a faulty physical core to a spare core. Finally, we apply the proposed design flow to design and optimize a picture-inpicture software.

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As single-processor systems are ceasing to scale effectively, multi-processor systems are becoming more and more popular. While there are many challenges of designing multi-processor systems in hardware, writing efficient parallel applications that utilize the computing capability of multiple processors may reveal to be even more challenging. In this paper, we introduce a framework that allows to efficiently execute applications expressed as Kahn process networks on multiprocessor systems using protothreads and windowed FIFOs. We show that application developers can use this framework to achieve considerable speed-ups on the Cell Broadband Engine without needing to write architecture-specific code.

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