Sunday 05.06.11

DAC'11 (Design Automation Conference)

The UMIC Research Center, represented in person by Prof. Ascheid, Prof. Leupers , Dr. Ute Müller and Dipl.-Ing. Maximilian Odendahl, exhibited at this year's Design Automation Conference (DAC) exhibition in San Diego, USA (June 6-8) to present the UMIC cluster and show some key research results.

DAC is a world leading, yearly exhibition in the area of software and hardware design for Embedded Systems. It includes both a large research conference and exhibition floor featuring industry leaders as well as promising newcomers, attracting more than 8000 visitors of industry and academia representatives from all over the world. DAC's well known reputation, size and target audience makes it a very fitting place to show advances of internal projects in this research area.

Therefore, MAPS (MPSoC Application Programming Studio), a retargetable compilation framework for heterogeneous and homogeneous multicore systems, was presented for the first time to a larger, external audience. MAPS, supported by UMIC, results from many years of research and is trying to solve the multicore programming challenge. Taking CPN (C for Process Networks), a light-weight C extension for parallel programming, as input, a newly, developed compiler allows automatic code generation for several targets using source–to–source transformations. This approach allows to leverage the existing compiler technologies of the target systems. Additionally, the framework includes powerful sequential code partitioning, mapping and scheduling facilities, which are easily exchangeable as well as extendable.