Nowadays it is more common to build embedded systems on a heterogeneous platform, i.e. a platform containing different computational units such as mCPU, GPU and FPGA. This enables better performance, but also introduces additional complexity with respect to the software deployment. For complex systems it is not obvious which deployment is the best. For different constraints and requirements, different deployment configuration can be optimal. To address this problem, an approach is to model the system, including both software and hardware parts, with specification of extra-functional properties. The deployment can be then modeled and an (semi)optimal solution can be provided. In this paper we present an overview of our planned research on software modeling and software deployment of heterogeneous embedded systems, which enables assisting the developer in designing this type of systems.
Sponsors: ACM SIGSOFT