This book provides a single-source reference to the state-of-the-art of high-level programming models and compilation tool-chains for embedded system platforms. The authors address challenges faced by programmers developing software to implement parallel applications in embedded systems, where very often they are forced to rewrite sequential programs into parallel software, taking into account all the low level features and peculiarities of the underlying platforms. Readers will benefit from these authors’ approach, which takes into account both the application requirements and the platform specificities of various embedded systems from different industries. Parallel programming tool-chains are described that take as input parameters both the application and the platform model, then determine relevant transformations and mapping decisions on the concrete platform, minimizing user intervention and hiding the difficulties related to the correct and efficient use of memory hierarchy and low level code generation.

Details a real-world product that applies a cutting-edge multi-core architecture Increasingly demanding modern applications—such as those used in telecommunications networking and real-time processing of audio, video, and multimedia streams—require multiple processors to achieve computational performance at the rate of a few giga-operations per second. This necessity for speed and manageable power consumption makes it likely that the next generation of embedded processing systems will include hundreds of cores, while being increasingly programmable, blending processors and configurable hardware in a power-efficient manner. Multi-Core Embedded Systems presents a variety of perspectives that elucidate the technical challenges associated with such increased integration of homogeneous (processors) and heterogeneous multiple cores. It offers an analysis that industry engineers and professionals will need to understand the physical details of both software and hardware in embedded architectures, as well as their limitations and potential for future growth. Discusses the available programming models spread across different abstraction levels The book begins with an overview of the evolution of multiprocessor architectures for embedded applications and discusses techniques for autonomous power management of system-level parameters. It addresses the use of existing open-source (and free) tools originating from several application domains—such as traffic modeling, graph theory, parallel computing and network simulation. In addition, the authors cover other important topics associated with multi-core embedded systems, such as: Architectures and interconnects Embedded design methodologies Mapping of applications

This Expert Guide gives you the techniques and technologies in embedded multicore to optimally design and implement your embedded system. Written by experts with a solutions focus, this encyclopedic reference gives you an indispensable aid to tackling the day-to-day problems when building and managing multicore embedded systems. Following an embedded system design path from start to finish, our team of experts takes you from architecture, through hardware implementation to software programming and debug. With this book you will learn: • What motivates multicore • The architectural options and tradeoffs; when to use what • How to deal with the unique hardware challenges that multicore presents • How to manage the software infrastructure in a multicore environment • How to write effective multicore programs • How to port legacy code into a multicore system and partition legacy software • How to optimize both the system and software • The particular challenges of debugging multicore hardware and software - Examples demonstrating timeless implementation details - Proven and practical techniques reflecting the authors' expertise built from years of experience and key advice on tackling critical issues

Efficient software development requires adequate toolsets to assist the developer in analyzing and optimizing a software application’s performance. With the relatively recent advent of multicore embedded hardware platforms, toolsets for supporting multicore development have appeared, although, in some cases, capabilities may be missing or immature, leaving software developers to manually massage outputs from one tool into inputs for the next tool or struggling to investigate unexpected multicore behaviors. This section reviews those multicore tools currently available for software developers as well as those that are still needed for adequate support.

This chapter discusses communication and synchronization libraries which can be used to implement parallelism in your embedded application. Details will be shared on several common libaries including Windows Threads, POSIX Threads, Threading Building Blocks, OpenMP, and MCAPI.

This chapter presents several different programming languages suitable for developing applications for multicore embedded systems. Writing programs for embedded systems can be very different from writing programs for general-purpose computers. Embedded systems may have resource limitations such as processing and battery power, memory, input/output capabilities and limited operating system functionality. They may have real-time and safety considerations that need to be met. In addition, developing for multicore embedded systems requires the programming language to provide concurrency support. In this chapter, special emphasis is placed on demonstrating features of each language that support efficient development on multicore embedded systems.

An operating system (OS) is an important component of most computer systems. At a minimum, the OS is responsible for managing tasks and resources. This becomes more challenging in a multicore environment, where multiple tasks can execute concurrently and must vie for shared resources. So the OS configuration is a critical consideration when building a multicore system. This chapter describes the different ways one or more OSes can be instantiated in multicore systems, along with many of the more critical controls that architects and programmers have for customizing the behavior of the OS. Included is a discussion of some of the debugging tools that are often shipped with OSes.

This book describes the state-of-the art of industrial and academic research in the architectural design of heterogeneous, multi/many-core processors. The authors describe methods and tools to enable next-generation embedded and high-performance heterogeneous processors to confront cost-effectively the inevitable variations by providing Dependable-Performance: correct functionality and timing guarantees throughout the expected lifetime of a platform under thermal, power, and energy constraints. Various aspects of the reliability problem are discussed, at both the circuit and architecture level, the intelligent selection of knobs and monitors in multicore platforms, and systematic design methodologies. The authors demonstrate how new techniques have been applied in real case studies from different applications domain and report on results and conclusions of those experiments. Enables readers to develop performance-dependable heterogeneous multi/many-core architectures Describes system software designs that support high performance dependability requirements Discusses and analyzes low level methodologies to tradeoff conflicting metrics, i.e. power, performance, reliability and thermal management Includes new application design guidelines to improve performance dependability

The performance of critical compute-intensive operations in embedded systems can be significantly improved by replacing software execution with hardware accelerators. Depending on how this is done, however, it may add concurrency even to a single-core system. This chapter discusses the different ways in which hardware accelerators can be designed and managed, and how the opportunity for concurrency can be exploited while avoiding the possible pitfalls of parallel execution.