Occam-pi as a High-Level Language for Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures

Recently we proposed occam-pi as a high-level language for programming coarse grained reconfigurable architectures. The constructs of occam-pi combine ideas from CSP and pi-calculus to facilitate expressing parallelism, communication, and reconfigurability. The feasability of this approach was illustrated by developing a compiler framework to compile occam-pi implementations to the Ambric architecture. In this paper, we demonstrate the applicability of occam-pi for programming an array of functional units, extreme Processing Platform (XPP). This is made possible by extending the compiler framework to target the XPP architecture, including automatic floating to fixed-point conversion. Different implementations of a FIR filter and a DCT algorithm were developed and evaluated on the basis of performance and resource consumption. The reported results reveal that the approach of using occam-pi to program the category of coarse grained reconfigurable architectures appears to be promising. The resulting implementations are generally much superior to those programmed in C and comparable to those hand-coded in the low-level native language NML.