The hardware application platform of the hartes project

Abstract

We describe the hardware platform that will be used to run several demonstrator applications within the EU-funded hArtes project. hArtes' main goal is to support, with appropriate tools, the development of complex applications on heterogeneous and reconfigurable systems. Our platform provides a number of heterogeneous computing sub-systems, such as DSPs, general-purpose CPUs and configurable elements (in the shape of FPGAs). The envisaged applications are mainly in the audio realm, so support for high-quality audio I/O is also present. FPGAs play a dual role: i) they support I/O functions for audio streaming, moving audio signals from/to main memory with full hardware support; ii) tightly coupled to traditional processors, they make up the reconfigurable processing core within the system. This paper describes the architecture and the first implementation of the platform.