Domain specific language integration for hardware-aware software generation

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When developing simulation software, the development team has to rely on the competence of subject matter experts (SMEs) in different areas and with expertise from a multitude of domains, such as mechanics, power electronics, avionics, and more. In general, expecting SMEs to translate their domain knowledge into an imperative programming language is quite unrealistic, leading to the use of domain-specific languages. When considering modern processors, with their increasing core count, specialized programming languages and software development paradigms have emerged, each offering different ways on how to fully exploit their power. Some frameworks offer programming paradigms tuned for specific hardware platforms which are well suited for software developers. Other frameworks instead provide higher-level abstractions which trade performance for usability to cope with software complexity. The result is that it is increasingly difficult to extract the maximum performance from the hardware without a considerable knowledge of the hardware and expertise in parallel programming. This is particularly important when considering the use of heterogeneous cloud computing resources: these are not fixed and the structure of the execution platform might change from one run to the other. The purpose of this project is to define a methodology for hiding software complexity from SMEs by automating the software generation, mapping and optimization according to inputs from SMEs and hardware and software experts, who describe the execution platform in sufficient detail. This methodology is applied in particular to the aerospace industry's Full Mission Simulators (FMSs), which are applications that are developed and maintained by multiple SMEs and are usually executed on large distributed computing systems. The overall result of this approach will be cost-effective and interoperable software products that will give a competitive advantage to the aerospace industry of Canada and Quebec.