The design of future systems on chips requires a scalable hardware-software design approach. In the SHAPES (scalable software hardware architecture platform for embedded systems) project, a new hardware-software architecture paradigm is investigated.

Within the SHAPES project, we are dealing with the challenge of providing an environment for programming parallel applications and mapping them to heterogeneous distributed architectures. In principle, we try to tackle this challenge by:

• leveraging an appropriate model of computation, namely Kahn process networks,
• using a dedicated application programming interface, and
• applying appropriate methods for mapping optimization.

Being under steady development, the current environment consists of the following parts:

• Distributed Operation Layer: The distributed operation layer (DOL) is a software development framework to program parallel applications. The DOL allows to specify applications based on the Kahn process network model of computation and features a simulation engine based on SystemC. Moreover, the DOL provides an XML-based specification format to describe the implementation of a parallel application on a multi-processor systems, including binding and mapping.

• Moses: Moses (modeling, simulation, and evaluation of systems) is a graphical front-end to the DOL and allows to "draw" rather than write parts of an application specification.

• Modular Performance Analysis: For real-time analysis of multi-processor systems, DOL specifcations can be converted into models for modular performance analysis (MPA).

Within the SHAPES project, our environment is used to develop streaming applications from such diverse areas as medical imaging, audio wave field synthesis, and physical modeling of complex systems.