Programmers to abstract the characteristics of the hardware to create applications that are optimized for multi-core processors - such an important goal and a half years ago, set a team members Multicore Association. This nonprofit organization develops standards that are intended to accelerate market entry of products based on the use of multi-core processors.
The efforts of the working group are embodied in an application program interface Multicore Task Management Application Program Interface (MTAPI), the availability of which at the end of this week announced the association.
To fully exploit the potential of homogeneous or heterogeneous multi-core processor or SoC programmer must divide the program into tasks that can be performed simultaneously by different cores. Today's operating systems and runtime library for embedded systems provide threads or similar arrangements, which are not suitable for fine threading demanded multicore architectures. This is usually due to the fact that the coordination of hundreds or thousands of concurrent tasks entails too much overhead compared with the useful computation time. Programming models that preceded MTAPI, require complex, low-level synchronization and programming streams are limited to one operating system running on a single homogeneous multi-core processor.
MTAPI eliminates these obstacles, enabling the development of parallel software using conventional processes, performing planning and allocation of tasks to processor cores. Optional direct access to the hardware to improve performance.
Unlike other API, providing task management (eg, OpenMP, TBB, Cilk, OpenCL), MTAPI suitable for embedded systems with limited resources. In addition, MTAPI will support different processor architectures, and can be implemented in C over different operating systems or without them, directly on the hardware. In short, MTAPI supports asymmetric multiprocessing in hardware and software.
MTAPI specifications are available for download free of charge on Multicore Association, as well as an overview MTAPI (MTAPI Nutshell) and detailed directory.
Among the members of Multicore Association can be distinguished company Broadcom, Freescale Semiconductor, LSI, MIPS Technologies, National Instruments, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments.
Source: Multicore Association
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