Proprietary interfaces and tools have been used for platform specific functionality. To strengthen the value of multicore, common practices, software interfaces and hardware definitions would be needed. Developers of multicore solutions were in need of a forum.
Foreseeing the growing demand for multicore solutions, in 2005, Markus Levy, now President of the Multicore Association (MCA), Sven Brehmer CEO of PolyCore software, and a select group of industry veterans held a meeting to discuss which areas of multiprocessing could benefit the most from standardization. The meeting resulted in the formation of the MCA whose first steps were to form several working groups.
Meet MCAPI, the Multicore Communications API, the association’s first-born. MCAPI is a specification that defines an API and a semantic for communication and synchronization between processing cores in embedded systems.
MCAPI brings symmetry to the table with the basic elements of communication and synchronization that are required for closely distributed (multiple cores on a chip and/or chips on a board) embedded systems.
MCAPI allows for extensive scalability, and offers more flexibility in application domains than other standards available for distributed systems programming. With the ability to support nearly any number of cores, operating systems and transports, the developers of Poly-Platform determined that the MCAPI standard was the perfect fit.
To refresh your memory, Poly-Platform is a collection of productivity tools and runtime communications engine, enables developers to quickly design, test and explore alternate configurations as necessary, with minimal effort.
MCAPI and Poly-Platform enable developers to design applications for today’s computer architectures knowing that the programming model will allow for the application to run on the next generation multicore computer.
Find out more about MCAPI by visiting www.multicore-association.org or download the API and take it for a spin!
Download the Multicore Communication API V2.015
Contributed by Martina Brehmer, Director of Marketing