Abstract

This paper presents Sassy, a single-assignment variant of the C programming language developed in concert with Khoral Inc. and designed to exploit both coarse-grain and fine-grain parallelism in image processing applications. Sassy programs are written in the Khoros software development environment, and can be manipulated inside Cantata (the Khoros GUI). The Sassy language supports image processing with true multidimensional arrays, sophisticated array access and windowing mechanisms, and built-in reduction operators (e.g. histogram). At the same time, Sassy restricts C so as to enable compiler optimizations for parallel execution environments, with the goal of reducing data traffic, code size and execution time. In particular, the Sassy language and its optimizing compiler target reconfigurable systems, which are fine-grain parallel processors. Reconfigurable systems consist of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), memories and interconnection hardware, and can be used as inexpens...

Citations