Blog
Multithreading examples for C programs, Part 1
Have you ever parallelized a C or C++ program? Then you got a slowdown first, didn’t you? Parallelization is a tough call because of data dependencies hiding behind pointers, unclear multithreading overheads, unexpected processor and OS behaviour, let alone potential starvation and deadlocks. Luckily, in the past 40 years computer engineers have been constantly accumulating best practices of industry-proven solutions to common concurrency challenges. They call them parallelization patterns.
Measuring Power Consumption of the OMAP4430 using the PandaBoard
Recently, I performed a series of power measurements on Texas Instrument’s OMAP4430 mobile SoC. The aim of this experiment was to confirm that we can perform such energy consumption measurements with sufficient accuracy for software source-code optimization. The software parallelization tools of Vector Fabrics can be used to lower power consumption, and measurements like these are needed to verify our results. Furthermore, it was my goal to evaluate speed/power trade offs in re-mapping a compute kernel from the multi-core ARM Cortex-A9 host processor onto the PowerVR SGX graphics processing unit.
Parallelizing a sequential C program using vfEmbedded
In this blog post I will explain how to use vfEmbedded to parallelize a small sequential C program. The program in question calculates the electric potential in a two dimensional plane created by a discrete set of point charges. The analysis and implementation of the recipes provided by vfEmbedded were done in three hours, speeding up the program with a factor 3.4.
Ten luminary quotes on parallel programming
Over the past few months I’ve read lots of great articles on multicore software development. In this blog I share a list of my top 10 favorite quotes.
Build it and they will come. Not!
Recently, I attended the TVS-organized conference “The Multicore Challenge II: Programming Multicore Systems” at the University of the West of England in Bristol, the second in a series of multicore-focused events. The program is online, and the presentations have been made available as well. I recommend Marco Cornero’s talk highlighting ST Ericsson’s adoption of multicore for mobile devices, as well as the OpenCL-focused presentation by the University of Bristol’s Simon McIntosh- Smith.