Portable Mapping of OpenMP to Multicore Embedded Systems Using MCA APIs

Multicore embedded systems are being widely used in telecommu-nication systems, robotics, medical applications and more. While they offer a high-performance with low-power solution, program-ming in an efficient way is still a challenge. In order to exploit the capabilities that the hardware offers, software developers are expected to handle many of the low-level details of programming including utilizing DMA, ensuring cache coherency, and inserting synchronization primitives explicitly. The state-of-the-art involves solutions where the software toolchain is too vendor-specific thus tying the software to a particular hardware leaving no room for portability. In this paper we present a runtime system to explore mapping a high-level programming model, OpenMP, on to multicore em-bedded systems. A key feature of our scheme is that unlike the existing approaches that largely rely on POSIX threads, our ap-proach leverages the Multicore Association (MCA) APIs as an OpenMP translation layer. The MCA APIs is a set of low-level APIs handling resource management, inter-process communica-tions and task scheduling for multicore embedded systems. By de-ploying the MCA APIs, our runtime is able to effectively capture the characteristics of multicore embedded systems compared with the POSIX threads. Furthermore, the MCA layer enables our run-time implementation to be portable across various architectures. Thus programmers only need to maintain a single OpenMP code base which is compatible by various compilers, while on the other hand, the code is portable across different possible types of plat-forms. We have evaluated our runtime system using several em-bedded benchmarks. The experiments demonstrate promising and competitive performance compared to the native approach for the platform