The Multicore Association

NEWSLETTER

Multicore Expo Call for Papers Open

The Call for Papers is now open with a deadline of December 15, 2008. Now in its 4th year, the Multicore Expo will host a wide variety of presentations focusing on:

• Multicore Development and Design Tools
• Multicore Architectures and Processors
• System-Level Multicore Implementations
• Hypervisors and Virtual Machine Technology
• Embedded Graphics and Multimedia

Whether you're a member of the Multicore Association or not, you need to be involved in this extremely compelling conference.

Major progress continues at the Multicore Association!

Status from the Multicore Resource Management API Working Group
The Multicore Resource Management API (MRAPI) working group, chaired by Jim Holt (Freescale) is focused on the following three areas of functionality:

1. Synchronization primitives
2. Shared memory primitives
3. Resource metadata

The group has completed updating two of the MCAPI use cases (automotive and networking) to include information about resource management. Surveys of the POSIX APIs for synchronization and shared memory primitives have been completed and reviewed. The group has also reviewed information from member companies regarding their existing implementations of resource managers and vision for metadata. The group has created and reviewed initial requirements drafts for the synchronization primitives and shared memory primitives, and has voted to move the synchronization primitives into the draft specification writing phase. There's plenty of opportunity for you to get involved - join the discussions now.

Status from the Multicore Programming Practices Working Group
The Multicore Programming Practices (MPP) working group, chaired by Max Domeika (Intel) and David Stewart (CriticalBlue), has completed a detailed proposal for the components of the best practices guide. The "heavy lifting" will begin soon as this team of experts begins writing the details of the official document. Join the working group to participate in this important project.

Free Downloads: Multicore Communication API (MCAPI) Specification and Example Implementation
If you haven't checked it out yet, the Multicore Association has made publicly available the full MCAPI specification and a source code example implementation. The example MCAPI implementation is comprised of C source code, a set of regression test-cases, and some example benchmarking code. This will allow multicore programmers to easily familiarize themselves with the functionality of MCAPI.

Revisions are Multicore Communication API
Members are currently working on revisions for the MCAPI. If you've got any inputs, now is the time to contribute.

Upcoming Presentations related to the Multicore Association

At the upcoming Embedded Software Engineering Kongress, Multicore Association president, Markus Levy, and Jean-Francois Roy from VMware will present “Applying Virtualization to Your Embedded Application”. David Stewart of CriticalBlue will present "Establishing Better Prractice for Programming Multicore". Mr. Levy will also present “Strategies for Benchmarking Multicore Processors” on behalf of EEMBC (www.eembc.org). The Kongress will take place in Sindelfingen, Germany on December 8, 2008.

Member Update

Our member list continues to expand. Recently, we've added LSI and Samsung Electronics to actively participate in our various working groups. Other members will be announced very soon. The current published list of members includes: CAPS entreprise, Carnegie Mellon University, Codeplay, CriticalBlue, Enea, eSOL, Freescale Semiconductor, IMEC, Intel, LSI , Mentor Graphics, MIPS Technologies, National Instruments, NEC Electronics America, Nokia Siemens Networks, Plurality, PolyCore Software, QNX, Samsung Electronics, Texas Instruments, Tilera, University of Utah, VirtualLogix, Virtutech, VMware, and Wind River.