Multicore programming project gets new member

Mike Beunder, Vector Fabrics' ceo, pictured, said: "Writing multicore and parallel software is extremely difficult, bordering on the impossible. We often say you need to be a ninja or black belt programmer to complete such a mission. We're excited to be working with these industry and academic leaders to further enhance our development tools that allow every software developer to become such a ninja programmer." The team's objective is to help designers to find the best software architecture, taking hardware constraints. Also involved in the project are Thales, Politecnico di Torino, École Normale Supérieure, INRIA, imec, University of Cantabria and Tedesys. The group says its tools will be capable of evaluating the parallel structure of an application and propose improvements, handle communications between different processors and generate the multiprocessor embedded code. In addition, a set of techniques and tools will impact the runtime behaviour of the application. The objective is to adapt the performance of the platform, for example by adjusting the frequency and voltage, in order to consume only the required energy to perform a specific task. The three year project, which started in September 2011, has a budget of €3.69million, of which €2.66m comes from the EU under the FP7 programme.