As multicore processing architectures grow in popularity, suppliers are rolling out solutions to help engineers program the new breed of devices.
PolyCore Software is offering a new version of its Poly-Platform that includes a graphical tool to map applications to multicore architectures. The tool is targeted at the telecom, datacom, military, aerospace, and process control sectors, but it can serve in virtually any application being migrated from the single-core world to the multicore one. The idea is to help engineers deal with the technical barriers inherent in splitting up applications to run on multiple cores in the same chip.
"For people who get used to single-core programming, the move to multicore can be challenging," Zihong Lin, strategic marketing manager for the multicore business at Texas Instruments (TI), told us. "The environment is different. They have to think out partitioning the software and syncing up all the tasks between the cores."
Texas Instruments' KeyStone-based DSPs incorporate a hardware feature called Multicore Navigator, which aids in programming. (Source: Texas Instruments)
In 2010, TI introduced a hardware solution called MultiCore Navigator that aims to help with the programming of multicore devices. In 2011, the most recent version of the OpenMP application programming interface came out. It gives engineers a flexible interface for developing parallel computing applications. And many other hardware and software suppliers have rolled out multicore solutions of their own.
Suppliers say not all applications need such tools. "If you're sending a message from one core to another, and that's the only direction it's going, then you can probably get away with whatever you're doing now," Ted Gribb, vice president of sales for PolyCore, told us. "But as soon as you want to do interactions between cores, then it becomes more challenging."
"When the application is doing different things in different cores, and there's a need for those cores to communicate, then it becomes complex," said Tom Flanagan, director of technical strategy for TI's multicore group.
Making the transition from single core to multicore programming is no easy task, and design and software engineers are going to need a helping hand. Software capabilities always lag behind what the power of the hardware promises. It took some time before visualization software, CAD tools, simulation software, and other development platforms were able to take advantage of the parallel processing capabilities of multicore servers. In fact, that transformation is still underway. I would expect the same with this kind of platform.
Beth, yes this type of tool is needed. It is akin to programming a FPGA with an soft processor. You then profile the application to determine which functions can be moved to the FPGA fabric. At least with multi-core you do not have the same problem you might have with multicomputers, or machines that are seperate with an interconnection network. That will probably be the next item (there are lots of computers in a modern car, for example). Perhaps we will see some consolidation there.
I don't want to sound like a shill for one of the advertisers of Design News, but in addition to these fantastic solutions from PolyCore Software and Texas Instruments, there is another Texas-based company, National Instruments, that has been evangelizing the utility of parallel, graphical, data flow programming that is a perfect fit for multi-threaded and multi-core processes. With its popularity in the engineering disciplines, there is no lack of fans for LabVIEW, but over the past 30 years it has taken a back seat to the popularity of other languages like such as C and Java in the non-engineering markets. Perhaps the rise of additional graphical programming tools like Poly-Platform and others will slowly move us past the bottleneck of text-based development environments and popularize the elegance of graphical programming.
Good point, Bill. National Instruments has been offering help with multicore for at least five years. The tools are there for multicore, and they're coming from multiple directions.
Interesting article. My experience is mainly in firmware/FPGA/HDL designs and grow up not using schematic capture or graphical tools for development. The main reason for this was coding offered more flexibility. I'm hoping the new generation of graphical tools is much better.
Shifting to multithreaded designs is a major effort. It's good to see more than the mere handful of design products that were available a few years ago to help make these shifts.
I think Zihong Lin stated something like people moving from single-core programming to multicore have to now think about partitioning the software. When I hear partitioning I think architecture. So regardless if you have firmware or software design, one or multicore upfront planning and architecture should always be done prior to coding. I've seen many poor designs because of the lack of pre-planning. I'm trying to build my software skills, think I will check this tool out.
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