SCF: a device- and language-independent task coordination framework for reconfigurable, heterogeneous systems

Heterogeneous computing systems comprised of accelerators such as FPGAs, GPUs, and Cell processors coupled with standard microprocessors are becoming an increasingly popular solution to building future computing systems. Although programming languages and tools have evolved to simplify device-level design, programming such systems is still difficult and time-consuming due to system-level challenges involving synchronization and communication between heterogeneous devices, which currently require ad-hoc solutions. To solve this problem, this paper presents the System-Level Coordination Framework (SCF), which enables transparent communication and synchronization between tasks running on heterogeneous processing devices in the system. By hiding low-level architectural details from the application designer, SCF can improve application development productivity, provide higher levels of application portability, and offer rapid design-space exploration of different task/device mappings. In addition, SCF enables custom communication synthesis, which can provide performance improvements over generic solutions employed previously.