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 inexpensive co-processors with conventional workstations or PCs. The compiler optimizations needed to generate highly optimal host, FPGA, and communication code, are discussed. The massive parallelism and high throughput of reconfigurable systems makes them well-suited to image processing tasks, but they have not previously been used in this context because they are typically programmed in hardware description languages such as VHDL. Sassy was developed as part of the Cameron project, with the goal of elevating the programming level for reconfigurable systems from hardware circuits to programming language.
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Hammes, J.P., Draper, B.A., Willem Böhm, A.P. (1999). Sassy: A Language and Optimizing Compiler for Image Processing on Reconfigurable Computing Systems. In: Computer Vision Systems. ICVS 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1542. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49256-9_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49256-9_6
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