Multicore coding standards aim to ease programming

IDG News Service - The Multicore Association is establishing specifications for a programming model that will reduce the complexity involved in writing software for multicore chips used in smartphones, tablets and other embedded systems.

The association is putting together a cohesive set of foundation APIs (application programming interfaces) to standardize communication, resource sharing and virtualization spanning cores on the same or different chips, said Markus Levy, the group's president.

Chip makers are adding CPUs, sensors and accelerators to chips as an energy-efficient way to boost application performance on devices. But multicore chips have also created a challenge for programmers, who have to write applications that scale across multiple cores and synchronize correctly to ensure calculations are executed in a certain order to get the correct output.

The low-level APIs provide a consistent multicore programming model from which applications can be tailored to run across chip architectures, operating systems and specialized hardware, Levy said. The Multicore Association has completed the MCAPI (multicore communication API) and MRAPI (multicore resource management API) for communication and resource management, respectively, and has working groups to create new tools and APIs related to virtualization.

"There are many beneficiaries of establishing these APIs. But the primary goal for all parties is to establish portability," Levy said. A consistent programming model makes it easier to reuse the application across different multicore platforms. Prior to these APIs, most designs used proprietary mechanisms that lacked portability, Levy said.

A smartphone may be designed using multiple processor cores running different operating systems, with each core providing different functionality, said Colin Walls, an embedded software technologist at Mentor Graphics, which makes the Nucleus real-time operating system that ships in around 400 million handsets each year. MCAPI provides a straightforward means for the software on the two cores to communicate, Walls said.

In some devices, one core could run an OS, like Android or Linux, to manage much of the user interface, execution of user applications, file and data management and communications. The other core could be somewhat invisible to the user and manage low-level phone activities such as establishing and maintaining a cellular network connection and handling calls.

"By using MCAPI, the embedded applications code does not need to be aware of the inter-core communications method. The code is portable between operating systems and chip architectures," Walls said.

MCAPI allows programmers to enable applications for multicore once and reuse that same code on multiple products in a product line and for next-generation devices, thereby improving engineering productivity, said Sven Brehmer, CEO of PolyCore Software, which provides development tools and runtime software for multicore and multichip communication.