Optimized Realization of Software Components with Flexible OpenCL Functionality

Today, the newly available embedded boards with GPUs provide a solution to satisfy the ever-increasing requirements of modern embedded systems. Component-based development is a well-known paradigm used to develop embedded systems. However, this paradigm lacks GPU support to address the specifics of these new boards. This leads to components that typically have reduced reusability, poor maintainability and portability. One way to tackle the existing shortcomings is through flexible components, i.e., platform-agnostic components that, at design time, offer the possibility to be executed either on CPU or GPU. The current realization of flexible components, i.e., as regular components with functionality tailored for the selected hardware, introduces additional overheads such as component communication overhead. In order to tackle the introduced overheads, our solution groups connected flexible components under a flexible group that conceptually behaves as a component. We introduce an algorithm to identify the existing groups in a given component-based system and the generation rules that automatically realizes groups as regular components. To evaluate the feasibility of the new concept, the flexible group is implemented using a state-of-the-practice component model (i.e., Rubus) and examined through the vision system of an underwater robot.