Abstract
In recent years, the use of multiprocessor systems has become increasingly common. Even in the embedded domain, the development of platforms based on multiprocessor systems or the porting of legacy single-core applications are frequent needs. However, such designs are often complicated, as embedded systems are characterized by numerous non-functional requirements and a tight hardware/software integration. This work proposes a methodology for the development and validation of an embedded multiprocessor system. Specifically, the proposed method assumes the use of a portable, open source API to support the parallelization and the possibility of prototyping the system on a field-programmable gate array. On this basis, the proposed flow allows an early exploration of the hardware configuration space, a preliminary estimate of performance, and the rapid development of a system able to satisfy the design specifications. An accurate assessment of the actual performance of the system is then enforced by the use of an hardware-based profiling subsystem. The proposed design flow is described, and a version specifically designed for LEON3 processor is presented and validated. The application of the proposed methodology in a real case of industrial study is then presented and analyzed.
Highlights
In the embedded systems domain, a proper tailoring of platform resources is always more frequently required in order to better exploit the whole system
Various field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) vendors provide soft-processors optimized for their reconfigurable logic: for example, Xilinx offers MicroBlaze [4] and PicoBlaze [5], and Altera has Nios-II [6]
This work does not focus only on a specific implementation but it defines a design flow that addresses the problem to implement a multicore platform on FPGA able to support the OpenMP library and that can be analyzed by means of a distributed HW profiling system
Summary
In the embedded systems domain, a proper tailoring of platform resources is always more frequently required in order to better exploit the whole system. 3.4 OS and OpenMP support Once the HW multicore architecture is implemented, by customizing and interconnecting soft-processors as suggested by the simulation results, and the hardware monitoring mechanism is inserted, there is the need to customize an SMP Linux operating system Such an OS is needed to support OpenMP application: OpenMP is a specification for a set of compiler directives, library routines, and environment variables that can be used to specify high-level parallelism in FORTRAN and C/C++ programs. At C5 configuration, four cores provide a speed-up of 3.1×: this value satisfied the requirement of speed-up equal or greater of 3×; the value was near to this threshold and, due to a not completely detailed model of the processor, a stronger band guard has been searched Another way to work with OpenMP has been exploited, i.e., the Single Process Multiple Data (SPMD) technique that allows a better control of the parallelization process of the main application loop program.
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