May 2, 2012 -- CriticalBlue has announced the availability of more support for different multicore platforms from Renesas Electronics Corp. 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.

The parallel processing on multicore 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 Eclipse-based embedded multicore programming system which lets software engineers easily assess and realize the full potential of multicore processors without significant changes to their existing development flows. Prism analyzes the behavior of code running on hardware-development boards, virtual machines or simulators. It lets engineers 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 programs 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.

Availability

A 30 day evaluation copy of the Prism Core PSPs for Renesas multicore platforms are available today from the CriticalBlue website.