Gannet
A Service-Based SoC Architecture
The service-based architecture is a proposed architecture for very large
Systems-on-Chip. A service-based architecture consists of a set of cooperating
services which will each complete a certain subtask, as opposed to completing
the task in a preprogrammed, 'ad hoc' manner by transfering data along hardwired
paths. The manner in which the services cooperate is defined by a task
description. In other words, the Gannet architecture is reconfigurable at task
level. Different tasks will require a different connectivity, which means that a
service-based architecture can only be succesfully implemented using an on-chip
communication network (NoC, network-on-chip). A service-based architecture makes
optimal use of the NoC concept to realise a new generation of extremely complex,
powerfull and resource-efficient Systems-on-Chip.
The task description language is a pure functional language and the architecture can be regarded as a distributed dataflow processor for this language.
For more information, source code and examples visit the GannetCode.org web site.
Publications
A list of publications on Gannet can be found in the departmental bibliography database.
Talks
The current focus of the Gannet project is on the task description language and the architecture. The following presentations report on the current state of the project.
Conference talks
- Gannet: a Scheme for Task-level Reconfiguration of Service-based Systems-on-Chip: presented at the 8th ACM/SIGPLAN Workshop on Scheme and Functional Programming, Freiburg, Germany, 30/09/2007
- Separation of Data flow and Control flow in Reconfigurable Multi-core SoCs using the Gannet Service-based Architecture: presented at the 2nd Conference on Adaptive Hardware and Systems, Edinburgh, UK, 08/08/2007.
- The Gannet Service-based SoC: A Service-level Reconfigurable Architecture: presented at the 1st Conference on Adaptive Hardware and Systems, Istanbul, Turkey, 19/06/2006.
- Gannet: a functional task description language for a service-based SoC architecture: presented at the Symposium on Trends in Functional Programming, Univ. of Nottingham, 18/04/2006.
Seminar talks
- A Framework for High-Level Programming of Heterogeneous Manycore Systems-on-Chip: talk given at the Institute for Computing Systems Architecture (ICSA), University of Edinburgh, 04/11/2010. (PDF)
- Programming the Interface between Computation and Communication: talk given at "The Programming Challenge of Heterogeneous Architectures" - BTG Application Workshop 22, Birmingham 2-3 July 2009.
- Gannet: a Service-based Architecture for Reconfigurable SoCs: talk given at the University of Essex, 21/11/2007 and the University of Massachusetts (Lowell, USA), 27/02/2008
- Operational Semantics for the Gannet Machine Language: talk given at the Scottish Programming Languages Seminar, ICMS, Edinburgh, 01/06/2006.
- Gannet: a service-based SoC architecture and task description language: talk given at the Scottish Programming Languages Seminar, Univ. of Strathclyde, 25/10/2005.
- Service-Based Architecture anf Functional Programming: This was the first talk on Gannet, given internally in the Department on 22/06/2005
Informal talks
- Gannet-Perl: Perl on the GannetVM: Glasgow.pm talk, 12 May 2011
- Compiling statically-typeable Perl into C++: Glasgow.pm talk, 12 May 2011