The Multicore Association

NEWSLETTER

At last year's Multicore Expo, the Multicore Association had presentations related only to its Multicore Communications API. Picking up the pace this year, the consortium will have presentations from each of its working groups providing a variety of practical information to attendees.

The Multicore Programming Practices working group (MPP) will present "Establishing Consistent and Reliable Multicore Programming Practices" covering a status update and insight into the progress of the group, showing examples of the various techniques that will be emphasized in its publicly-available best practices guide.

The Multicore Resource Management API working group (MRAPI) will present "Designing a Platform Agnostic Resource Management API for Multicore Systems" which will describe the motivation and need for MRAPI, along with related work, features, status, and next steps of the specification.

The Multicore Communications API (MCAPI) working group will present "Applying an Industry Standard Communication API to Your Embedded Multicore Design" and provide an update on its completed specification, along with practical guidelines for using this specification today in your homogeneous or heterogeneous multicore designs.

The Multicore Virtualization Working Group (MVWG) will give a presentation entitled "Standards-based Multicore Virtualization Framework for Hypervisors and Distributed I/O". The presentation will explain the primary motivations
behind the establishment of MVWG and an update on the group's progress.

Pre-Conference Activities
The Multicore Association kicks off the Multicore Expo on March 16 from 1-5pm with working group meetings hosted by each of its technical working groups. These meetings are open for members and non-member conference
attendees. As a guest of the Multicore Association, you'll get to experience our technical meetings first hand which will help you decide how to get involved as a member.

Simply go to the Multicore Expo Registration, and at the bottom of page two, click "I would like to attend the Multicore Association technical working group meetings as a guest (non-member). Please reserve my space for this afternoon session on March 16."

Progress Continues at the Multicore Association!

The Multicore Programming Practices (MPP) working group, chaired by Max Domeika (Intel) and David Stewart (CriticalBlue), has completed a detailed outline for the components of the best practices guide. The next phase will
be drafting of each section of the document. Join the working group to participate in this important project.

The Multicore Resource Management API (MRAPI) working group, chaired by Jim Holt (Freescale) is focused on:

1. Synchronization primitives
2. Shared & Distributed memory primitives
3. Execution Environment metadata

The group has updated two of the MCAPI use cases (automotive and networking) to include information about resource management, with one more under development. Surveys of the POSIX APIs for synchronization and shared memory primitives have been completed and reviewed, and work is beginning to perform a survey of metadata standards. The group has reviewed information from member companies regarding existing implementations of resource managers, requirements for distributed memory management, and vision for
metadata. The group has created and reviewed requirements drafts for the synchronization primitives and shared memory primitives, and has created and performed an internal review of the synchronization primitives
specification. There's plenty of opportunity for you to get involved - join the discussions now.

Don't Forget the No-Cost Downloads:

• Multicore Communication API (MCAPI) Specification. Download
• and Example Implementation of the Multicore Communications API. Download

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.