Hardware/Software Partitioning of Dataflow Programs Rapid Prototyping of Computer Systems in the CAL Actor Language

iii Dataflow programming is emerging as a promising technology for program-ming of parallel systems, such as multicore CPUs and FPGA. Development for parallel hardware is very different compared to single core system, and calls for new tools and languages. Within the Ptolemy II project a new language- the CAL Actor Language- has been invented for the specification of dataflow programs. Subsequently Xilinx and Ericsson Research have been developing tools for this dataflow lan-guage, particularly a compiler and runtime environment. Meanwhile the lan-guage was adopted by the ISOMPEG body as a specification language for video (de)coding algorithms (RVC-CAL). The CAL toolchain chain includes code generators for both hardware and software targets. This opens up interesting opportunities for design of a mixed system, implemented partially as software executing on a CPU and partially as a hardware accelerator, emulated by a FPGA. In this thesis the two problem