A UML model-driven approach to efficiently allocate complex communication schemes

To increase the performance of embedded devices, the current trend is to shift from serial to parallel and distributed computing with simultaneous instructions execution. The performance increase of parallel computing wouldn’t be possible without efficient transfers of data and control information via complex communication architectures. In UML/SysML/MARTE, different solutions exist to describe and map computations onto parallel and distributed systems. However, these languages lack expressiveness to clearly separate computation models from communication ones, thus strongly impacting models’ portability, especially when performing Design Space Exploration. As a solution to this issue, we present Communication Patterns, a novel UML modeling artifact and model-driven approach to assist system engineers in efficiently modeling and mapping communications for parallel and distributed system architectures. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach with the design of a parallel signal processing algorithm mapped to a multiprocessor platform with a hierarchical bus-based interconnect.