XMCAPI: Inter-core Communication Interface on Multi-chip Embedded Systems

Abstract

Multi-core processor technology has been applied to the processors in embedded systems as well as in ordinary PC systems. In multi-core embedded processors, however, a processor may consist of heterogeneous CPU cores that are not configured with a shared memory and do not have a communication mechanism for inter-core communication. MCAPI is a highly portable API standard for providing inter-core communication independent of the architecture heterogeneity. In this paper, we extend the current MCAPI to a multi-chip in a distributed memory configuration and propose its portable implementation, named XMCAPI, on a commodity network stack. With XMCAPI, the inter-core communication method for intra-chip cores is extended to inter-chip cores. We evaluate the XMCAPI implementation, xmcapi/ip, on a standard socket in a portable software development environment.