Exploring application model instances in system-level design

Abstract—In the PROGRESS Artemis project [1] an architecture work-bench is being developed. A case study [2] has been done in order to eval-uate a set of concepts and techniques encapsulated in the workbench. In this case study we mapped a modified M-JPEG application onto a shared memory multi-processor architecture. We did a design space exploration for alternative architecture instances and mappings. One of the conclusions we draw from this case study is that in the ex-ploration process we need techniques to refine a given application and to generate alternative model instances of the application. Such techniques are necessary for efficient system-level design space exploration. In this pa-per we present algorithmic transformation techniques for deriving a set of application model instances exploiting the task-level parallelism hidden in applications. We include these techniques in a tool called Compaan [3] and give some illustrative examples