CAST - A Task-Level Concurrency Analysis Tool

CAST is a system-level software tool that supports the design of concurrent systems. It assumes that the functional model of a system is specified as a set of compute nodes that communicate with each other using point-to-point connections. CAST provides concurrency analysis, support for refinement of the concurrency in the model to implement, and guidance in the design-space exploration. Its main focus is on streaming applications. This paper provides a brief tutorial on CAST. It describes the implementation of the techniques used to model and analyze the concurrency in a specification. Visualization of the metrics is key for performing a guided design-space exploration, which is why visualization is an integral part of CAST. This paper presents therefore also our solutions for visualizing concurrency in a specification.