Partners from research and industry have joined forces to simplify the development of software for embedded multicore processors.
Many electronics products are based on multicore systems where several parallel processor cores are integrated on one chip to increase processing power. However, creating programs to run on such devices can be time-consuming and expensive.
Now, the EU-funded ALMA group aims to solve that problem by producing software tools that will enable multicore devices to be programmed from a higher level of abstraction, where a programmer will not need detailed knowledge of the complex architecture of the processor hardware.
ALMA -- an acronym for ALgorithm parallelization for Multicore Architectures -- is being coordinated by Professor Jürgen Becker and Dr. Michael Hübner from KIT's Institute for Information Processing Technology (ITIV; Karlsruhe, Germany).
"In ALMA, we will show how various embedded multicore processors from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Recore Systems can be efficiently programmed using the same tool-chain and the same application code," said Professor Nikolaos Voros, the scientific coordinator of the project, who hails from the Technological Educational Institute of Mesolonghi (Mesolonghi, Greece).
The researchers will illustrate the effectiveness of their tools by showing how they can be used to create image processing, object recognition, and mobile communication applications.
The three-year ALMA project has been funded with a €3.2 million grant from the European Union. More information on the project can be found at www.alma-project.eu.
-- By Dave Wilson, Senior Editor, Vision Systems Design
