Library Support in an Actor-Based Parallel Programming Platform

Actor model-based design is actively researched for parallel embedded SW design since the model exposes the potential parallelism explicitly in an architecture-neutral form. In most actor-oriented models, actors are self-contained and data channels are the only sharable object between actors, and they compose a system in a flat layer. In contrast, it is common to use shared library functions and construct vertically layered software for efficiency and modularity. To fill this gap between modeling and implementation, we propose a special actor, library task, with new types of ports: library master port and library slave port. It is a sharable and mappable object that defines a set of function interfaces inside. N:1 master-slave connection allows sharing a library task and the master-slave connection can specify vertically layered software and client-server applications naturally.To support the library task in our embedded software design environment, we develop an automatic mapping algorithm as well as an automatic code generator. The design environment with the library task is applied for two target platforms: IBM CELL Broadband Engine and an ARM-based multicore simulator. Preliminary experiments show that the special actor, or library task, extends the expression power of the previous actor model with efficiently generated codes.Manuscript received October 05, 2010. revised January 21, 2011; accepted February 21, 2011. Date of publication March 24, 2011; date of current version May 06, 2011. This work was supported in part by the BK21 Project, Acceleration Research sponsored by KOSEF research program (R17-2007-086-01001-0), and in part by the Seoul R&BD Program (JP090955). This work was also supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (2010-0005982). Paper no. TII-10-10-0254