A comparative evaluation of open source tools for multicore and reconfigurable computing

In this paper we evaluated several free and open source compiler tools in the domain of tightly coupled multicore and fine grain reconfigurable systems. We chose the classic x86, ibm cell, and FPGA accelerator boards as representatives of commodity hardware of today. Our point of view was that of a traditional programmer (vs. hardware developer), so we focused on parallelizing compilers, and computation models such as OpenMP, in order to evaluate not just performance, but also the ease of use and level of automation in exploiting parallelism. Our case studies are based on previous work of Gokhale et. al and are an extension of those in the context of technical advances. The major purpose of our work is to establish an infrastructure which enables us to do experiments that combine FPGA-oriented and multicore-oriented compilation for the maximal execution time improvement of a single scientific program.