Multicore programming made easy?

By Richard Stahl, IMEC
Embedded.com  (09/23/09, 10:10:00 AM EDT)

The first multicore platforms have found their way into embedded systems for entertainment and communication, especially thanks to their greater computational power, flexibility, and energy efficiency. However, as we will show, mapping applications onto these systems remains a challenge that is costly, slow, and prone to errors.

Although the multicore programmable architectures have a huge potential to tackle present and future applications, a key issue is still open: how can developers map an application onto such a multicore platform fast and efficiently, while profiting from the potential benefits of parallel processing?

This question can be reformulated as: what programming model should they use? (In a broad sense, a programming model is a set of software technologies and abstractions that provides the designer with means to express the algorithm in a way that matches the target architecture. These software technologies exist at different levels of abstraction and encompass programming languages, libraries, compilers, run-time mapping components, and so forth.)

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