2.0 Code Generation with Ptolemy
A key idea in Ptolemy is that there is no single scheduler that is expected to handle all situations. Users can write schedulers and can use them in conjunction with schedulers we have written. As with the rest of Ptolemy, schedulers are written following object-oriented design principals. Thus a user would never have to write a scheduler from ground up, and in fact the user is free to derive the new scheduler from even our most advanced schedulers. We have designed a suite of specialized schedulers that can be mixed and matched for specific applications. After the scheduling is performed, each processing element is assigned a set of blocks to be executed in a scheduler-determined order.
For targets consisting of a single processor, we provide two basic scheduling techniques. In the first approach, we simulate the execution of the graph on a dynamic dataflow scheduler and record the order in which the actors fire. To generate a periodic schedule, we first compute the number of firing of each actor in one iteration of the execution, which determines the number of appearances of the actor in the final scheduled list. An actor is called runnable when all input samples are available on its input arcs. If there is more than one actor runnable at the same time, the scheduler chooses one based on a certain criterion. The simplest strategy is to choose one randomly. There are many possible schedules for all but the most trivial graphs; the schedule chosen takes resource costs into account, such as the necessity of flushing registers and the amount of buffering required, into account (see [8] for detailed discussion of SDF scheduling). The Target then generates code by executing the actors in the se The second approach we call "loop scheduling". In this approach, actors that have the same sample rate are merged (wherever this will not cause deadlock) and loops are introduced to match the sample rates. The result is a hierarchical clustering; within each cluster, the techniques described above can be used to generate a schedule. The code then contains nested loop constructs together with sequences of code from the actors. The loop scheduling techniques used in Ptolemy are described in [9]; generalization of loop scheduling to include dynamic actors is discussed in [24].