Procedure cloning: a transformation for improved system-level functional partitioning

Abstract

Functional partitioning assigns the functions of a system's program-like specification among system components, such as standard-software and custom-hardware processors. We introduce a new transformation, called procedure cloning, that significantly improves functional partitioning results. The transformation creates a clone of a procedure for sole use by a particular procedure caller, so the clone can be assigned to the caller's processor, which in turn improves performance through reduced communication. We define several cloning heuristics that seek to clone the minimum number of procedures, a goal necessary to obtain the best improvements. We highlight experiments comparing our cloning heuristics and showing partition improvements with cloning.