Vector Fabrics Newsletter November 2011

Vector Fabrics closes series B round of financing

Early in November, we closed our B round of financing, led by new investor Newion Investments. Return investors TechnoStars and Point-One Starter Fund also joined this B round, further expanding their holdings. Our programming tools are used to develop code for multicore embedded systems that are at the heart of virtually every smart system you can think of today, from smartphones to cars and from televisions to game consoles. With the backing of Newion Investments and the closing of our B round, Vector Fabrics can now concentrate on increasing its marketing and sales activities.

Read the full press release

This month’s Very Cool Feature highlight: Speedup prediction

Sometimes, the overhead of introducing threads and synchronizing them introduces more delay than can be offset by the concurrency gain. Many of these overhead costs relate to details of the target hardware architecture and the interaction between the threads, e.g. memory access patterns, cache sizes, etc. vfEmbedded analyzes this interaction and estimates additional latencies, predicting the effects on the speedup of your parallelized program before you touch a single line of code. This allows you to “look before you leap”, greatly reducing the risk of spending a lot of time on code changes that actually slow down the code, instead of speeding it up.

See this feature in action, Sign up for our free evaluation

Measuring OMAP4430 Power Consumption on the PandaBoard

Recently, our CTO Jos van Eijndhoven performed a series of power measurements on Texas Instrument’s OMAP4430 mobile SoC. The aim of this experiment was to perform energy consumption measurements with sufficient accuracy for software source-code optimization. Vector Fabrics’ parallelization tools can be used to lower power consumption, and measurements like these are needed to verify our results. The article gives a detailed description on how to measure the energy usage of the individual ARM and PowerVR cores on the PandaBoard.

Read the Pandaboard power measurement article

Bits and Chips Embedded Systems Conference

On November 18th, our Chief Architect Paul Stravers presented “Success factors of a multicore project?” at the Embedded Systems conference. The talk was well attended, and it is clear that multicore software development is quickly becoming a key topic of interest for embedded systems developers.

View the presentation slides

Parallelizing a sequential C program using vfEmbedded

Our intern Henk Erik van der Hoek wrote a brief article that explains 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 parallelization recipes provided by vfEmbedded was completed in three hours, resulting in a program speedup factor of 3.4x. Step-by-step instructions and full source code is available.

Read the parallelization article  |  Sign up for our free trial

We’re hiring!

Vector Fabrics is expanding, and as a result, we have vacancies for a Senior Adobe Flex/Java Developer, a Senior Field Application Engineer, Software Developers, and Student interns. We drive innovation, push boundaries and are pioneers in the world of embedded systems and multicore programming. Interested in joining our team? Please don’t hesitate to contact us.

View our open positions

Upcoming Events

Please contact us at info@vectorfabrics.com to schedule a meeting with us at these shows. We are looking forward to speaking with you about your multicore development projects.

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