Managing Complexity in Heterogeneous System Specification, Simulation, and Synthesis

2 Specification, Simulation, and Synthesis

Ptolemy [6] is an environment for simulation and prototyping of heterogeneous systems. Instead of trying to capture all possible models of computation into one all-encompassing model, the Ptolemy kernel implements an open architecture that enables an unlimited number of extensible models to be defined. Each model (called a "domain") is responsible for implementing its own data processing and data exchange strategies.

Heterogeneous systems can be specified using different levels of abstraction and/or semantics for the various subcomponents. For instance, a multimedia telecommunication system can be specified as a combination of an event-driven subsystem representing the packet-switched network and a dataflow subsystem modeling the signal processing components. Ptolemy supports multi-paradigm simulation in which different computational models co-exist; e.g. a dataflow system can interact with a finite-state machine component, or a hardware system can interact with software. Finally, heterogeneous systems can be synthesized using the hardware and software synthesis mechanisms reported in [2][4][7]. We have developed a mechanism to combine diverse schedulers (with different optimization objectives) for the software synthesis process [8]. This simplifies the software scheduling problem and also enables the use of specialized schedulers. This paper will focus on managing the complexity in these phases of the design process.

Managing Complexity in Heterogeneous System Specification, Simulation, and Synthesis

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