ICOS: An Intelligent Concurrent Object-Oriented Synthesis Methodology for Multiprocessor Systems

this paper are also parallel systems which include both tightly-coupled multiprocessors and loosely-coupled multicomputers. Multiprocessor system-level synthesis is a design automation process where starting from a set of system descriptions, performance constraints, and a cost bound, a multiprocessor architecture is synthesized by determining the number and type of processors used, the processing cluster organization, the type of system interconnection, and the amount of memory with its logical and physical organization. A multiprocessor synthesis system is different from currently available uniprocessor synthesis systems because the design of the target architecture now requires exploring many more design alternatives and performance tradeoffs. A uniprocessor system has only one processing element, so currently available uniprocessor synthesis systems need only consider the type of processor and determine the amount of memory to use, whereas a multiprocessor system architecture has more than one processor, so we must decide how many processors to use, how to interconnect the processors using some interconnection network, determine the way in which the main memory is organized, and classify cache memory into local, primary, and secondary levels. All of these considerations are critical to the feasibility and performance of the final synthesized architecture and they are not taken into consideration by uniprocessor synthesis systems. Furthermore, an important aspect of multiprocessor system synthesis is how the workloads are distributed into each processor and the balancing of the processor workloads in order to maximize the system performance. This distribution and balancing of workloads mainly depends on the type and number of processors available, on how the processo..