Section: New Results

An integration language for Averest/Quartz and Polychrony/Signal

Participants : Ke Sun, Jean-Pierre Talpin.

As typical synchronous languages, Quartz and Signal possess their own respective characteristics [11] . In particular, Quartz, an imperative synchronous language, mainly focuses on the description of the control-flow. The Quartz model is always reactive and synchronously deterministic. Different from Quartz models which can only be monochronous, a process in Signal may be polychronous, meaning that its clock hierarchy can form a forest. Therefore, the potential integration between Averest, a framework for Quartz, and Polychrony, a toolset for Signal, may offer a practical mode to develop globally asynchronous locally synchronous (GALS) systems: program imperative and reactive modules in Quartz, then synthesize the scheduler from their Signal network specification.

To maximally benefit from the existing achievements for the two languages [12] , the main idea is to communicate the Quartz modules with each other via asynchronous wrappers without changing the original code. Considering that the Quartz modules should be still deterministic in asynchronous environment, the wrapper should be capable of controlling the IO streams. On the other hand, the wrapper, as a module interface, will make sense for automatic scheduler synthesis, the next step.

We will propose a new, easy to use, domain-specific language to help the user specify the input traces as requirements to the environment and define the IO traces as guarantee of the module. From the user-defined specification, a series of clock constraints, assertions, etc. may be synthesized in the form of Signal specification. Thus, this language may bridge the gap between Polychrony/Signal and Averest/Quartz.