The Influence of Parallel Programming Interfaces on Multicore Embedded Systems

Abstract

Thread-Level Parallelism (TLP) exploitation for embedded systems has been a challenge for software developers: while it is necessary to take advantage of the availability of multiple cores, it is also mandatory to consume less energy. To speed up the development process and make it as transparent as possible, software designers use Parallel Programming Interfaces (PPIs). However, as will be shown in this paper, each PPI implements different ways to exchange data using shared memory regions, influencing performance, energy consumption and Energy-Delay Product (EDP), which varies across different embedded processors. By evaluating four PPIs and three multicore processors (ARM A8, A9 and Intel Atom), we demonstrate that by simply switching PPI it is possible to save up to 59% in energy consumption and achieve up to 85% of EDP improvements, in the most significant case. We also show that the efficiency (i.e., The best possible use of the available resources) decreases as the number of threads increases in almost all cases, but at distinct rates.