Roadside assistance with an industry-standard inter-process communication – MCAPI
By Tedd Gribb and Martina Brehmer, Polycore Software, and Markus Levy, The Multicore Association
Planning the Multicore Journey
Approaching multicore is like planning a road trip; the vehicle should be in good shape and ready for travel. Similarly, a multicore project must be carefully planned. Engineering projects come with unknown factors and a multicore project adds complexity.
One perspective of the multicore journey can be seen in the roadmap of the Multicore Association’s (MCA) roadmap, with the primary goal being to develop an extensive set of application programming interfaces (APIs) and the establishment of an industry-supported set of multicore programming practices and services. One of these is the communications API, MCAPI, the underlying focus of this article.
Questions that Designers Face in Planning a Multicore Journey
Is the application ready for multicore? Does it have “built-in” concurrency characteristics or will it require some restructuring to efficiently run on a multicore platform? Modification is likely.
Is message passing a good approach? Synchronization may be more challenging with true concurrency.
What is the best way to ensure scalability and code re-use for the future? The next platform may have many more cores and designers should be able to re-use the application as the number of cores increases.
What tools are available? Good tools are always useful; with multicore, they are critical.