PolyCore Software has introduced Poly-Mapper, an Eclipse GUI-based communications topology mapping tool for use with multicore processors. PolyCore president and chief executive officer Sven Brehmer said developers can use the tool to partition and distribute applications across multiple cores.
“Being able to quickly remap functions to different cores and to reconfigure topology resources allows developers to make several iterations in a short period of time to find a good balance between performance and resource utilization,” he said.
Wizards and dropdown menus facilitate the creation of topologies, and topology properties can be accessed with multiple views. A companion product, Poly-Generator, processes and validates the topology map and generates an optimized, C-based topology definition consisting of one set of files (.c + .h) for each node in the topology. The application and topology can be combined through a standard compile and link with Poly-Messenger/MCAPI (Multicore Communications Application Program Interface) runtime libraries.
Brehmer said multicore applications are driven by the need for greater performance and/or lower power consumption. Prospective automotive applications include infotainment and collision avoidance, both of which involve streaming data. “Currently, there aren’t a lot of tools and standards for multicore application development,” he conceded. “It will take time, but all of the major automotive microcontroller vendors have multicore devices.
Brehmer said the Poly-Mapper, Poly-Generator, and Poly-Messenger combination provides a multicore communications platform that is both flexible and easy to use, providing a standardized communications API, hardware abstraction, and system discovery, and a clean separation between the application and the topology. The separation often allows remapping and reconfiguration to be done without changing the application.