Much of current research is devoted to system design and little work is
done on requirements analysis. One of our main objectives is
how an application problem is transformed into specifications.
Working in the hardware-software codesign perspective, a
system is designed starting from an application problem itself.
Given an application problem, specified as a directed-acyclic graph of
elementary problems, a hardware-software solution is derived
such that the synthesized software, a parallel pseudo-program, can be scheduled
and executed on the synthesized hardware, a set of system-level parallel
computer specifications, with heuristically optimal performance. This is
known as system-level cosynthesis of application-oriented general-purpose
parallel systems for which a novel methodology called
Cosynthesis Methodology for Application-Oriented Parallel Systems
(CMAPS), is presented. CMAPS explores the relationship between hardware designs
and software algorithms by interleaving the modeling phases and the
synthesis phases of both hardware and software.
Scalability and upgrading to new technologies are achieved
through modularization.
The work presented in this paper would be beneficial to
designers of general-purpose parallel systems which must be oriented
towards solving some user specified problem such as visual computing,
and network servicing.