A Concurrent Reactive Esterel Processor Based on Multi-Threading

Esterel is a concurrent synchronous language for developing reactive systems. Classically, Esterel programs are either compiled into software, such as a C program that is then executed on a standard microprocessor, or into hardware. An alternative approach, which tries to combine the efficiency of a software solution with an efficiency close to a hardware solution, is the reactive processing approach, where the Esterel program is executed on a specialized processor. A principal difficulty when compiling onto a reactive processor is the faithful, efficient implementation of concurrency. One approach for implementing concurrency is multiprocessing, where sequential reactive processors are replicated and tightly synchronized to achieve concurrency. This allows concurrency at the top level; however, it is not obvious how this approach supports the arbitrary nesting of preemption and concurrency that is permitted in Esterel. This paper presents a novel reactive processor architecture, the Multi-threaded Esterel Processor (MEP), which overcomes this limitation and also scales well to large degrees of concurrency. Rather than replicating sequential processors, the MEP combines a single main processing element with independent control units that implement the concurrency and preemption operators and that allow the arbitrary combination of these operators in the executed program