Extending the Rubus Component Model with GPU-aware Components

To support the complex functionality expected of modern embedded systems, the trend is to supplement CPUs with Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), thus creating heterogeneous embedded systems. However, taking full advantage of GPUs increases the complexity of the development and requires dedicated support, and no such support exists in the component models currently available. The only solution today is to completely encapsulate all GPU-specific information and operations within the components, which increases the communication overhead and reduces component reusability, thus significantly limiting the applicability of component-based development to heterogeneous embedded systems.In this paper, we propose to extend Rubus, an industrial component model for embedded systems, with dedicated support for GPUs. We introduce new constructs, including GPU ports and automatically generated adapters to facilitate seamless component communication over the heterogeneous processing units, regardless of whether the components use the CPU, GPU, or both. A running example is used for the problem description, the proposed extension, and to evaluate our solution.