A Co-design Approach for Hardware Optimizations in Multicore Architectures Using MCAPI

Current SoC platforms targeting high-performance with high power efficiency rely on replicating several processing cores while adding dedicated hardware units for specific tasks. However, programming such architectures demand a high effort when compared to homogeneous multiprocessors since there is no widely used standard for heterogeneous embedded systems. The use of standard application programming interfaces (APIs) increases the programmability but also costs performance/memory usage overheads.

Providing mechanisms at the software level leveraging on dedicated hardware resources can help reducing that impact. To address this point, this work presents a co-design approach for improving programming based on a standard API deployed through a mix of hardware and software support for tasks synchronization. Results present a reduction of up to 88% in network traffic and processor active times during synchronization phases when compared to a pure software implementation.

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