Consortium's First Industry-Standard Specification Will Enable Multicore Application Portability
SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 1, 2008 /PRNewswire/ -- MULTICORE EXPO -- The Multicore Association, an industry consortium focused on developing standards that speed time to market for systems using multicore processors, today announced that version 1.0 of its multicore communications application programming interface (MCAPI) specification has been completed and will soon be made publicly available.
"A key part of having software applications run efficiently on multicore architectures is to enable swift intercore communication on the chip," said Eric Heikkila, industry analyst with VDC. "The MCAPI proposal will help multicore software developers build applications that can run on a wider variety of multicore architectures, enlarging their multicore design options and minimizing the amount of time spent porting and tuning applications for different multicore implementations."
MCAPI captures the basic elements of inter-core communications that are required for embedded "closely distributed" systems and scales to support hundreds of processor cores. The potential applications for such an API are extremely varied, but its principal use will be in embedded multicore systems with tight memory constraints and task execution times and requiring reliable on-chip interconnect and high system throughput. Besides the details of the API, the MCAPI specification includes example usage models for multimedia, networking, and automotive applications.
"MCAPI provides three communication modes: connectionless messages, connected channels for packets, and connected channels for scalars. It also provides functions for endpoint and non-blocking operations management," said Sven Brehmer, chairman of the Multicore Association's MCAPI working group and president and CEO of PolyCore Software, which plans soon to introduce the first commercially available implementation of MCAPI. "MCAPI was designed to provide basic and simple multicore communication functionality," Brehmer added. "This allows for flexible and high performance implementations and more complex functionality to be layered on top of MCAPI."
"MCAPI, the result of two years of intense consortium work, has been developed by a wide variety of member companies that range from processor vendors such as Freescale Semiconductor, Intel, MIPS Technologies, and Tilera, to software and development tool suppliers such as Codeplay, eSOL, Imperas, PolyCore Software, and Wind River," said Markus Levy, president of the Multicore Association. "Such a variety of contributors helps ensure that the specification will be applicable to many different types of multicore systems. We look forward to making this specification publicly available and seeing widespread industry adoption."
Interested programmers should contact the Multicore Association to find out how to obtain the MCAPI specification. Further information is available at http://www.multicore-association.org/.
About The Multicore Association
The Multicore Association provides a neutral forum for vendors who are interested in, working with, and/or proliferating multicore-related products, including processors, infrastructure, devices, software, and applications. Currently, the organization is set up with three working groups: Multicore Communications API (MCAPI), Hypervisors, and Multicore Resource Management. Members include ARC International, Codeplay, Enea, eSOL, Freescale Semiconductor, Imperas, Intel, Mentor Graphics, MIPS Technologies, National Instruments, NEC Electronics America, Nokia Siemens Networks, Plurality, PolyCore Software, QNX, Texas Instruments, Tilera, the University of York, and Wind River. Further information is available at http://www.multicore-association.org/.
The Multicore Association
