SAN JOSE, California,
May 2, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --
Release of new Prism Platform Support Package helps
developers unlock the power of Renesas' manycore
parallel architecture
CriticalBlue, a provider of embedded multicore software
analysis, exploration and verification tools with associated
services, announced today the availability of more support for
different multicore platforms from Renesas Electronics Corporation
(TSE: 6723) , a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor
solutions, within its Prism product. Software developers using
various Renesas' multicore platforms can now analyze their existing
software applications, quickly evaluate performance on the chosen
platform, and accelerate the implementation and tuning of their
software on the parallel architecture.
This announcement deepens the existing collaborative
relationship between CriticalBlue and Renesas which previously
produced Prism support for SH-4A and V850 platforms and now adds
supports for the imaging hardware accelerator engine based
multicore platforms.
Multimedia processing functions, such as network connection or
voice and image processing require high performance processing,
particularly in automotive applications where the growing use of
electronics continuously demands more performance but faces the
challenge of the increasing power required to achieve that
performance.
Renesas, as the leader of the automotive microcontroller (MCU)
market, has introduced multicore products to answer this market
demand. The parallel processing on these platforms improves the
performance while optimizing the power efficiency. However, such
platforms introduce some new concepts from the developers'
perspective when porting their software from single to multicore
platforms. Renesas quickly responded to concerns about these new
challenges and chose to develop, in collaboration with
CriticalBlue, support for Renesas multicore platforms within the
Prism tool. This delivers a software solution which enables users
to take advantage of the parallel architecture while allowing them
to get a good understanding of the achievable performance of the
multicore design and the resulting porting effort.
Prism is an award winning Eclipse-based embedded multicore
programming system which allows software engineers to easily assess
and realize the full potential of multicore processors without
significant changes to their existing development flow. Prism
analyzes the behavior of code running on hardware development
boards, virtual machines or simulators. It allows engineers to take
their existing sequential code, and before making any changes,
explore and analyze opportunities for concurrency. Having
identified the optimal parallelization strategies in this way,
developers implement parallel structures, and use Prism again to
verify performance efficiency and thread-safe operations.
In addition to partitioning software onto multicore hardware,
the availability of this new Prism Platform Support Package (PSP)
will be that users can quantify the benefit of migrating their
software applications to multicore platforms. Developers can
analyze the impact of the parallel architecture, selecting a number
of cores and viewing data cache performance at function or source
line level, resulting in an ability to see the impact of such core
architectural features on the overall concurrent schedule. This
important feedback to the software programmer would be extremely
difficult to visualize otherwise. Ultimately, Prism provides
developers with an estimate of the performance gain achievable by
partitioning their program into multiple threads, as well as
providing a methodology and flow to implement, tune and verify that
multi-threaded software.
These analyses can be done on existing unmodified software
applications running on an instruction set simulator. Experienced
multicore software programmers will benefit from Prism's
capabilities in the area of performance tuning and general
multicore code optimization.
A 30 day evaluation copy of the Prism Core PSPs for Renesas
multicore platforms are available today from the CriticalBlue
website http://www.criticalblue.com/prism/renesas/.
Supporting Quotes:
"We have added support for many different homogeneous multicore
platforms since Prism was released in 2009 but this is our first
many-core platform." said David
Stewart, CEO, CriticalBlue. "Highly parallel engines present
a deeper set of challenges for software developers and it has been
a pleasure to continue working with Renesas to realize a solution
which will deliver tangible benefits to our joint customers."
"The multicore architecture delivers outstanding performance
when configured correctly and loaded up with sufficient work to
process, and our customers often ask us for help in figuring out
how best to migrate their applications to the parallel platform."
said Jean-Luc Bui, engineer,
Renesas. "The Prism technology, coupled with the knowledge of
CriticalBlue's engineers, creates an ideal environment to evaluate
the benefits available to our customers if they use our multicore
platform and to implement the required software changes efficiently
and safely."
Key Points:
- Prism helps speed development and optimization of multicore
software applications and hence accelerates time to market of end
products based on highly parallel architecture.
- Integration with Prism allows Renesas customers to analyze
their existing single threaded application code for use with
multicore platform.
- Prism technology is an Eclipse plug-in and is based on dynamic
tracing of the users' software execution.
- Developers can work in a familiar Eclipse environment using
existing IDEs and compilers alongside CriticalBlue's Prism
development tools.
- The Renesas V850, SH-4A and image hardware accelerator engine
PSPs for Prism are available now.
About CriticalBlue
CriticalBlue guides software developers through the task of
migrating to and optimizing code on multicore platforms through the
delivery of innovative and multicore software focused tools,
training and services. The increasing use of complex, multicore
processor architectures has accelerated demand for CriticalBlue's
technology and expertise throughout all electronic industry
sectors. Headquartered in Edinburgh,
Scotland, with offices in San
Jose, California, and Tokyo,
Japan, the company has delivered multiple solutions for key
aspects of embedded software design, including Prism, a multicore
embedded software design environment. The company is funded by
European, US Silicon Valley, Japanese venture capitalists and
corporate investors. To learn more, please visit
http://www.criticalblue.com
All product or service names
mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.