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Seeding Multicore Infrastructure
Imperas Launches Open Virtual Platforms (Bryon Moyer)
Seeding a saturated solution for optimal crystal growth can be a tricky business. The highest-quality, largest crystals grow when given lots of time for the molecules to orient themselves in the lattice. Seeding too late can result in chaotic explosive nucleation, small granularity, and low quality. Seed too early, and, well, there may not technically be a problem, but being an impatient species, if we don’t see crystal growth quickly enough, we tend to get bored and move the seed elsewhere.
Saturation is something of a measure of potential, of pent-up demand. There is more and more willingness to orient along coordinated lines, but that initial seed is missing, around which everything can congregate. The multicore market, while ballyhooed for some time now, has grown slowly because of the need for new programming models and development infrastructure. Demand has existed, but it hasn’t been compelling enough to drive a robust commercial marketplace. Those companies that were either forced into multicore or saw first-mover opportunities there have tended to create their own tools, keeping them proprietary for convenience or competitive advantage. Things are very fractured, with few clear trends.
We’re getting to the point now, however, where embedded multicore is going to have to step out of the shadowy corners and take on mainstream status. Demand has slowly built for common infrastructural elements around which to build a toolchain. In particular, there’s a need for a way to validate and debug software programs before the hardware is available. Hardware simulators are too slow and provide more precision than is needed for most application development; a higher-level simulation model can provide accurate enough behavior at reasonable performance. While it’s too expensive for everyone to do their own from scratch, everyone seems to be waiting for someone else to go first.
Imperas has decided that this means the solution is now saturated enough to warrant seeding some crystallization, but not super-saturated to the extent that chaos would ensue. It’s still early enough for alignment to occur in an orderly fashion, and so they’ve announced the formation of the Open Virtual Platforms alliance, or OVP, and have seeded it with some of their technology.
There are three basic components to the OVP: APIs, models, and a reference simulator that they have named OVPsim. The APIs provide a consistent interface for modeling all of the elements of a platform, as well as the platform itself. The main APIs are the modestly-named Innovative CPU Manager (ICM) for creating platforms; the Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) for creating processors; Behavioral Hardware Modeling (BHM) for handling processes, delays, and events; and Peripheral Programming Model (PPM) for creating peripheral interconnections. They’ve provided the C header files and documentation. [more]
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