TITEL

How to best develop your multicore project

SPREKER

Gerald van Kampen, systeemarchitect, Wind River

TAAL

Nederlands, sheets in het Engels

ABSTRACT

The first thing in developing a multicore project is to understand the possibilities and usage scenarios of a multicore solution. There are many options available for a multicore system to best fit your needs: you can have a single operating system (OS) managing the entire multicore chip with symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), run multiple OS each on a single core with asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP or SAMP), or have multiple OS instances  - such as Linux, VXWorks or Windows - on a (single or multiple) core through virtualization, or any mixes of the above. We will look at each multicore software configuration in more detail and also address some key questions that help to choose the best configuration. For instance, when choosing between SMP and AMP some considerations come into play such as: is the application already multi-instance or multithreaded? Do tasks/threads need to share data frequently? Is redundancy needed for reliability?