ASTEX: A Hot Path Based Thread Extractor for Distributed Memory System on a Chip

This paper addresses the problem of partitioning C code into threads at compile time in order to map them onto System on a Chip (SoC). The Automatic Speculative Thread EXtractor, ASTEX, construct sets of thread partitions based on hot path. ASTEX use a speculative model that, contrary to previous approaches, does not assume a shared memory. The speculation is performed on control flow and data structure layout. The output is a set of threads characterized by their execution time, the amount of memory and communication required, etc. Preliminary results show that the approach is able to capture and to characterize the main computation kernels of embedded applications.