Reactive parallel processing for synchronous dataflow

The control flow of common processors does not match the specific needs of reactive systems. Key issues for these systems are preemption and concurrency, combined with timing predictability. To model reactive systems, synchronous programming languages are well-suited, which can be either synthesized to hardware or compiled to C and run on a normal processor. Both of these approaches have significant drawbacks: the generation of hardware is inflexible, the timing analysis of the generated C code is complicated. We propose a special parallel processor, designed to execute programs written in the synchronous dataflow language Lustre, or its graphical variant Scade. This approach achieves an efficient but still predictable execution. We introduce the processor as well as compiler from Lustre and Scade. To validate our approach, we compare a prototype of the processor, running on an FPGA, with a MicroBlaze processor that executes C code generated from Lustre programs. Keywords Reactive pro...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: SAC
• Authors: Claus Traulsen, Reinhard von Hanxleden
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Dataflow Language Lustre, Reactive Systems, SAC 2010, Synchronous Dataflow