Tools for code optimization and system evaluation of the image processing system PAPRICA-3

This paper presents the complex environment that was built to ease the prototyping of real-time applications on the PAPRICA-3 massively parallel system. Applications are developed in C++ using high level data types and the corresponding Assembly code is automatically created by a code generator. A stochastic code optimizer takes the assembly code and improves it according to a genetic approach; due to the high computational power required by this approach, the stochastic code optimizer was implemented with MPI and runs in parallel on a cluster of workstations. The availability of this complex environment allowed to test the performance of the system and to tune it according to some target applications before the actual development of the hardware. For this purpose a system-level simulator was also built to determine the number of clock cycles required to run a specific segment of code. The whole environment has been used to validate possible solutions for the hardware system and to develop, test, and tune several real-time image processing applications. The hardware system is now completely defined.