Slide 6 of 12
Notes:
Over the history of the PIM configurations, the development environment, architecture, and HMI philosophy has remained constant.
The Paracell Navigator environment is where Paracell applications are developed. The language and the programming model were designed from the ground-up to take advantage of a parallel architecture, and to provide a way to easily develop agent-based solutions. The Navigator environment provides a 3x3 matrix that extends ten levels deep so that code can be decomposed easily. The environment also provides a rich set of tools, including debuggers, trackers, and a powerful compiler and download utility.
The PIM runtime environment is based on a read-execute-write model. Each frame, all of the processor cells read their inputs from global memory, execute their code, and simultaneously write their results back to global memory so that the information is available on the next frame. Though two processing cells may update the same variable, the Navigator provides utilities to determine which update has precedence. This “systolic” execution model plays a key part in guaranteeing each processor ample resources, which in turn provides guaranteed, predictable performance.
HMI and interaction with the PIM and data has always been a key building block of the product. Beyond the visual programming environment of the Navigator, the ParaScope utility allows PIM values to be displayed in powerful, mainstream HMI environments such as LabView by National Instruments. This interface between the PIM and COTS HMI environments is bi-directional, in that ParaScope will pass user-entered data from the LabView display to the PIM.
