Who Should Read this Document?
This document is a product of the Polymorphous Computing Architectures (PCA) program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It is intended for application programmers, system engineers, and managers as a high-level introduction to PCA [1 ] systems in general, and software development for PCA systems in particular. PCA platforms offer a significant increase in capability and flexibility over traditional computing platforms. However, the systems are also significantly more complex, thus presenting new problems requiring new solutions for application development.
The PCA program established the Morphware Forum [2] to develop and establish a portable application development methodology for PCA systems. The Morphware Forum is a joint activity of the participants in the DARPA PCA program, as well as other interested developers of embedded computing hardware, software, and application technology. A methodology that includes new source languages, a new application development process, and a framework for expressing system and application metadata has been developed to allow application developers, hardware developers, and build-tool developers to deploy high performance, flexible PCA-based computing systems. Those elements of this methodology defined by the Morphware Forum are termed the Morphware Stable Interface (MSI) or simply morphware. The defined software, metadata, and programming standards of the MSI allow the developer to abstract diverse PCA hardware targets from the application software requirements.
This document gives an overview of the elements and structure of the MSI. After reading this document an application programmer will understand the basic concepts used in developing PCA applications. Also, as an example of the type of defense applications that will benefit from a PCA system, a benchmark developed under the PCA program, the Integrated Radar Tracker, is described.
Detailed descriptions of the concepts introduced in this document are found in other MSI documents. At the time of this writing, the MSI is still under development, so the framework described here is subject to change.