SLAP 2006 Compiling Esterel for Distributed Execution

The compilation of Esterel into software has mainly targeted uniprocessor execu-tion. The inherent parallelism of the original description would typically have to be compiled away in order for it to be executed sequentially on a processor. This paper proposes a new compilation scheme that would be able to compile Esterel for distrib-uted execution. This method enables the parallelism of the original description to be realised through actual concurrent execution on multiple processors, or through sequentialized concurrency within a single processor. Both these forms of concur-rency can be mixed together for a given implementation. Experimental results indicate significant speed-ups in the performance of concurrently executed distrib-uted programs compared to software implementations on a uniprocessor. When the prototype compiler is used to compile for just a single processor, results show that its performance is comparable to other simulation-based compilers, and significantly faster compared to gate-based compilers, especially for large programs