Spinnaker: The design automation problem

Abstract

This paper describes the design automation issues and techniques used to design a massively parallel processing platform - SpiNNaker - from a hardware and systems design perspective. The emphasis of this paper is addressing the key problem of resource mapping, where multiple threaded programs are to be targeted onto a hardware platform that consists of multiple ARM cores and other resources such as memory and networks. In addition, the design environment is considered to ensure that a designer can program applications onto this environment in a practical manner. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.