Performance Analysis of Paralldroid Programs

The advent of emergent System-on-Chip (SoCs) and multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSocs) opens a new era on the small mobile devices (Smartphones, Tablets, ...) in terms of computing capabilities and applications to be addressed. The efficient use of such devices, including the parallel power, is still a challenge for general purpose programmers due to the very high learning curve demanding very specific knowledge of the devices. While some efforts are currently being made, mainly in the scientific scope, the scenario is still quite far from being the desirable for non-scientific applications where very few of them take advantage of the parallel capabilities of the devices. We develop a performance analysis in several SoCs using Paralldroid. Paralldroid (Framework for Parallelism in Android), is a parallel development framework oriented to general purpose programmers for standard mobile devices. Paralldroid presents a programming model that unifies the different programming models of Android. The user just implements a Java application and introduces a set of Paralldroid annotations in the sections of code to be optimized. The Paralldroid system automatically generates the native C or Renderscript code for the annotated section. The results obtained are quite promising. With a very low development effort the running times are significantly reduced. The Paralldroid transformation model involves source-to-source transformations and skeletal programmin