Multicore Embedded Research Articles

Domain-Specific Programming Environment for Heterogeneous Multicore Embedded Systems

Nowadays embedded systems are used in a broad range of domains such as avionics, space, automotive, mobile, domestic appliances etc. Sophisticated software determines the quality of embedded systems and requires high-qualified experts for software development. Software becomes the main assert of embedded systems that is valuable to retain in changing computing platforms in embedded systems evolution. Computing platforms for embedded systems became multicore processors and SoC, they can change in the embedded system lifetime that could be long (dozen of years for an automobile and airplane). It requires software porting to new platforms as a regular process. Many tools and approaches allow developing of software for domain area experts, but mainly for general-purpose computing systems. In this paper the authors present the complex technology and tools that allows involving domain experts in software development for embedded systems. The proposed technology has various aspects and abilities that can be used to build verifiable and portable software for a wide range of embedded platforms.

Design Issues in a Performance Monitor for Embedded Multi-core Systems

Multi-core processors have elevated the performance of software via true parallelization. However, this has also created new challenges. One serious issue is the bottleneck in system performance due to synchronization, cache misses, or resource starvation, which is hard to detect in application software with runtime changing behavior. Performance monitors are usually employed for such detection. Nevertheless, monitors have introduced their own computation and communication overheads, especially in embedded multi-core systems. In this work, we propose a multi-core performance monitor and evaluate the effects of monitor overheads on different types of tasks, such as CPU-bound and IO-bound tasks. Further, we give suggestions on the number of monitors and the type of monitor deployments for embedded multi-core applications. Besides trying to reduce monitor overheads, we also aim at the accuracy and the immediacy of the monitored information. Through a real-world example, namely digital video recording system, we demonstrate how different monitoring periods affect the tradeoff between the accuracy and the immediacy.

C++ Support and Applications for Embedded Multicore DSP Systems

In recent years embedded systems have entered the multicore era. As the number of cores keeps growing in embedded systems, it becomes more important to provide programming support which considers e...