Title: Porting of Automotive Application on to Embedded Multicore Platform
Abstract: In modern computer hardware, increase in processing capacity is gained by introducing more processor cores but not with increased clock speed. This may imply reduction in processing capabilities as far as the individual cores are concerned. So it is necessary to partially restructure the applications that are not designed to benefit from multiple cores for maintaining the existing performance. To improve the quality of experience for drivers as well as passengers, multi-core embedded systems are getting adopted on a very large scale in automotive industry. But measures and methodolo- gies for porting applications are yet to be standardized. Solving the issues related to it will open up interesting avenues for utilization of multi-core sys- tems in automotive industry. This work emphasizes on porting legacy automotive application onto embedded multicore platform for better performance. Demand for higher performance in electronics was generally met by shrinking silicon chip and increasing the fre- quency of operation, but it was found that this approach can- not be continued forever. This led to the evolution of multi- core innovation. More and more applications now require higher performance out of the platform on which they are working. Processor architects are therefore moving towards multi-core processors. All kinds of integrated circuits and elec- tronic systems including analog components, communications systems, logic devices, micro electromechanical systems (MEMS), sensors and microcontrollers are linked together to enable a safe and enjoyable driving experience. The use of sin- gle processing cores being replaced by multicore processors has opened up new challenges in the embedded domain. The code written for single processing cores and also the hardware peripherals being limited, has brought about the need for re- structuring of the earlier code called the Legacy code. Porting above mentioned legacy code to a new mul- ti-core platform is now a preferred method instead of writing new code from scratch. One of the major challenges in migrat- ing serial software to a parallel environment is to ensure that, the system's functionality is still correct after spreading the functionality across several cores, all executing simultaneous- ly. After the introduction of multi-core processors, software developers have started writing parallel programs for the effective use of available multiple cores. However, there are sequential legacy applications that have been developed over the past few decades. If such applications are being executed on multicore hardware, then optimal usage of all cores will not be guaranteed. Only one core will be utilized by such applications and the other cores would remain idle, if the operating system does not support any parallelism while scheduling. This is where it is necessary for the need of conversion of existing code which execute sequentially to one where the parallel architecture of multicores are utilized fully. If an application's work can naturally be broken up, run in parallel, and aggregated at the end of an operation, such ap- plications can be benefited from multi-core processing. Pro- cessor-intensive tasks such as video and audio processing, scientific and financial modeling applications and CAD ren- dering are examples of such applications. This work comprises of taking an existing application of automotive nature and effectively partition the application and its efficient porting on a multi-core platform.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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