Application development on hybrid systems

Hybrid systems consisting of a multitude of different computing device types are interesting targets for high-performance applications. Chip multiprocessors, FPGAs, DSPs, and GPUs can be readily put together into a hybrid system; however, it is not at all clear that one can effectively deploy applications on such a system. Coordinating multiple languages, especially very different languages like hardware and software languages, is awkward and error prone. Additionally, implementing communication mechanisms between different device types unnecessarily increases development time. This is compounded by the fact that the application developer, to be effective, needs performance data about the application early in the design cycle. We describe an application development environment specifically targeted at hybrid systems, supporting data-flow semantics between application kernels deployed on a variety of device types. A specific feature of the development environment is the availability of performance estimates (via simulation) prior to actual deployment on a physical system.