Communication issues in heterogeneous embedded systems

The recent accelerated development of scalable computing systems has made possible the coordinated use of a suite of High Performance Computing (HPC) components for computationally demanding problems in embedded applications. These emerging Scalable Heterogeneous High Performance Embedded (SHHiPE) systems are designed using commercial off the shelf (COTS) modules. Our current interest is to employ these platforms to solve variety of problems in real time signal processing. Large performance gains can be realized by exploiting knowledge of the computational structure of an algorithm through data remapping. We present the motivation for a portable programming paradigm that captures key features of a SHHiPE platform. The Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard is proposed as a basis for development of this paradigm. An application in sonar is used to illustrate typical communication requirements in SHHiPE systems.