The book “Multicore Programming – Increasing Performance through Software Multithreading” by Shameem Akhter and Jason Roberts is part of a series of books put out by Intel in their multicore software push. In case you have not noticed, Intel has a huge market push currently where they give seminars, publish articles and books, and give curricula to universities in order to get more parallel software in place. I read this book recently, and here is a short review.
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Author: Jakob
Mark Nelson’s Multicore Non-Panic and Embedded Systems
Via thinkingparallel.com I just found an interesting article from last Summer, about the actual non-imminence of the end of the computing world as we know it due to multicore. Written by Mark Nelson, the article makes some relevant and mostly correct claims, as long as we keep to the desktop land that he knows best. So here is a look at these claims in the context of embedded systems.
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When Multicore makes Things Simpler, like IMA
Most of the time when talking about the impact of multicore processing on software, we complain that it makes the software more complicated because it has to cope with the additional complexities of parallelism. There are some cases, however, when moving to multicore hardware allows a software structure to be simplified. The case of Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) and the honestly idiotic design of the ARINC 653 standard is one such case.
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The Register reporting from SC’07
The Register has a pretty good report from the Supercomputing (SC) 2007 conference. Quite knowledgeable, and mostly about the thorny issue of programming massively parallel fairly homogeneous machines likes GPUs and floating-point accelerators. Of course, their commentary has to be commented on. Read on for more.
Off-Topic: Car Sizes and Prizes
The car market is pretty fascinating in many ways. Going out actually buying a car quite recently, I was given cause to reflect on prize vs actual size. The non-linear prize increase you have to pay to get to a slightly bigger car from whatever point you are at is interesting. And the fact that a “very small” car is just above four meters long, while a “pretty large” car is at around five meters. How can a few centimeters actually matter that much?
Intel ARK
Intel has a really neat tool on their homepage: the Intel ARK — Automated Relational Knowledgebase. It is a horrible name for a brilliant tool: it lets you search for processor names, codenames, chipsets, and jump around in a database of processor variants, compatible chipsets, feature lists, and more. Not that I care particularly about Intel chips, but the tool is something everyone selling silicon devices should copy. Being able to quickly figure out just what is inside a certain device (and what is not), and finding related devices and compatible chips is just brilliant for curious people, customers, and supporting services.
Please, everybody else?
Øredev 2007
Just like in 2006, I went to the Øredev conference in Malmö and presented a workshop using Virtutech Simics. This year, I worked with Jonas Svennebring from Freescale and we created a workshop around parallelizing network processing software for running on a multicore Freescale processor. The workshop went reasonably well, and the participants definitely learned something about what we trying to get across, even though we did not have much time to actualy complete the programming assignments.
Off-topic: Open Command Prompt Here on Vista
I just found out that my favorite Windows XP PowerToy is built into Windows Vista. To get to a command-prompt located in any folder directly from the Explorer, follow the instructions found at a Microsoft MSDN blog: Tim Sneath : Windows Vista Secret #1: Open Command Prompt Here. Very useful. But why not make it more obvious than “press shift while right-clicking?”.
Virtualization and Linux on a DSP Processor
A small tidbit that I found interesting due to the targeted platform. LinuxDevices reports that the VirtualLogix VLX-NI virtualization layer that used to run only on x86 platforms now also run on TI DSPs in the C64+ series. Basically, you put their virtualization layer on the DSP, and you can then on the same core run both a Linux kernel and a DSP/BIOS kernel. Thus supporting traditional DSP development and Linux-style development on the same core.
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Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Multicore vs Programmers
An old colleague just sent me an email bringing up a discussion we had last year, where he was a strong proponent for the homogeneous model of a multiprocessor. The root of that discussion was the difference between the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 processors. The Xbox 360 has a three-core, two-threads-per-core homogeneous PowerPC main processor called the Xenon (plus a graphics processor, obviously), while the PS3 has a Cell processor with a single two-threaded PowerPC core and seven SPEs, Synergistic Processing Elements (basically DSP-like SIMD machines).
In the game business, it is clear that the Xenon CPU is considered easier to code for. This means that even though the Cell processor clearly has higher theoretical raw performance, in practical the two machines are about equal in power since it is harder to make use of the Cell. Which seems to be a fact.
So here, homogeneous systems do appear to have it easier among programmers. However, I do not believe that that extends to all systems, all the time, everywhere.
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Valve Source Engine Multicore Port (presentation comment)
Game engine development company Valve has a nice presentation up on their website about how they attacked multithreading. It is a nice example of how to solve multicore programming for a particular domain by the classic layered approach.
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Off-Topic: Vista Refuses Aero for Java
Off-Topic: Fun Error Message
I just got a funny error message from YouTube. Searching for quite innocuous terms like “Ã…nglok” a highly trained group of Monkeys kept popping up. Read on for screen dump.
Hardware Debug Support & LinuxLink PodCast
The TimeSys Embedded Linux Podcast (also called LinuxLink Radio) is a nice listen about embedded computing using Linux. Sometimes they are a bit too open-source centric, though, and ignore very good tools that live in the classic commercial world. One such example is the recent episode 20 on debugging tools, where they totally ignore modern high-powered hardware-based debugging.
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FTF Paris: Debug connections threat to secure network devices
In a report from FTF Paris 2007, Info World makes some interesting comments on security and locking-down of mobile devices. Info World » Blog Archive » ‘Flat IP’ mobile networks face new security challenges:
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