A new hardware coprocessor for accelerating Notification-Oriented applications

This paper presents a new hardware coprocessor to accelerate applications developed using the Notification-Oriented Paradigm (NOP). A NOP application presents the advantages of both event-based programming and declarative programming, enabling higher lever software development, improving code reuse, and reducing the number of unnecessary computations. Because a NOP application is composed of a network of small computational entities communicating only when needed, it is a good candidate for a direct hardware implementation. In order to investigate this assumption, we have created a coprocessor that is able to run existing NOP applications. The coprocessor was developed in VHDL and tested in FPGAs and provided a decrease of 96% in the number of clock cycles, compared to a purely software implementation.