Automatic Mapping of Khoros-based Applications to Adaptive Computing Systems

Abstract

An adaptive computing system (ACS) composed of programmable logic components can serve as a flexible hardware accelerator, especially for image-processing applications. To enable application designers who are unfamiliar with hardware details to map their applications onto an ACS, a software environment called CHAMPION is being developed. This paper presents the specific steps required to map a Khoros flow diagram onto an ACS constructed using five Xilinx XC4000 parts. A productivity improvement of 100x (2.5 hours vs. 250 hours) was estimated for the automatic implementation as compared to a manual one for a moderately complex target recognition algorithm. The ACS was able to execute the algorithm 156 times faster than the Khoros simulation running on an UltraSparc. I. Introduction Traditionally the mapping of an application onto an ACS has taken months to develop and debug. The goal of the research described here is to develop and demonstrate a software design environment which will ...