Mocasin—Rapid Prototyping of Rapid Prototyping Tools

We present Mocasin, an open-source rapid prototyping framework for researching, implementing and validating new algorithms and solutions in the field of mapping software to heterogeneous multicores. In contrast to the many existing tools that often specialize for a particular use-case, Mocasin is an open, flexible and generic research environment that abstracts over the approaches taken by other tools. Mocasin is designed to support a wide range of models of computation and input formats, implements manifold mapping strategies and provides an adjustable high-level simulator for performance estimation. This infrastructure serves as a flexible vehicle for exploring new approaches and as a blueprint for building customized tools. We highlight the key design aspects of Mocasin that enable its flexibility and illustrate its capabilities in a casestudy showing how Mocasin can be used for building a customized tool for researching runtime mapping strategies in an LTE uplink receiver.