Automatic Customizable Tool-chain for Heterogeneous Multicore Platform Software Development (TOUCHMORE)

Framework: FP7 — Cooperation
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Destination: Alternative Paths to Components and Systems
Action type: Collaborative project
Countries involved: Italy,Italy,France,Switzerland,Italy,France,United Kingdom,United Kingdom
Call:  (FP7-ICT-2011-7, 2011)
Start date: 2011-09-01
End date: 2014-05-31
Duration (months): 33.0
Total project cost (EUR): 3969841.0
EU funding (EUR): 2899863.0
Participants: 8
Project status: CLOSED

Recent trends in embedded system architectures brought a rapid shift towards multicore, heterogeneous and reconfigurable platforms. This makes chip design enormously complex and imposes a large effort for the programmers to develop their applications. For this reason, new and more efficient tools for software development are needed to ensure software productivity and time to market of new applications. In particular, the automation of the software design process starting from high level models all-the-way down to a customized and implementation on specific architectures is a key factor to increase programmer productivity. The ToucHMore project will develop software tools that facilitate energy efficient and robust software for Heterogeneous Multicore Systems (HeMCS) with the goal to reduce the time-to-market in the design of such systems by at least 15%, as well as the cost of software design through the automation process by 20%. In more detail, the center of the methodology is the high level modeling language (UML/SysML) that will be used to describe the target platform and application. High level modelling allows an architectural independent description of the application and for this reason it is prone to customization for different architectural templates. In ToucHMore, customization will be performed in an automated way through automated generation of parallel code for multicore tiles and the required mechanisms to manage reconfigurable DSPs/accelerators. In addition, the ToucHMore tool-chain customization environment will focus on energy efficiency and robustness of the generated code, where the uncertainties due to fabrications of transistors in nanometer technologies will be hidden, thus mitigating their impact in terms of energy and performance. From a research perspective, ToucHMore is a pioneering project from the perspective of taking a pragmatic approach to bring variability issues into the software design flow. Together with the automatic toolchain customization strategy coupled with high level modeling, these contribution will give the European research on embedded software a leading position. The project results will be commercially exploited by the SME ATEGO as a specialised software tool vendor and by the company AKHELA that is an IT services and Embedded Systems provider to large scale companies in areas such as automotive, avionics and consumer electronics. The project results will strengthen their position in their respective markets by enabling the production of products faster and more timely than the world wide competitors and it is expected that they will have a manifold return on their investment. The five research institutions will use the gained knowledge to enrich their teaching and research activities enabling them to stay at the forefront of technology and substantiating their prestige in the scientific community.

Keywords: tool-chain,sofwtare customization,multicore,energy efficiency,low-power,process variability,reconfiguration,dsp,code generation,runtime library,runtime management