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Prism Overview
Wondering what benefits multicore platforms would deliver for your existing sequential software? You are not alone...
Software teams resist parallelizing their applications because they can't risk potentially complex and uncertain development cycles without real assurance that they can achieve high quality code, on time, with predicted power and performance improvements. By working closely with multicore engineers, CriticalBlue developed Prism™ to take developers from 'what-if' to 'requirements met', streamlining sequential to parallel programming in five best practice steps
1. Analyze
Characterize a serial or parallel application on real workloads. Identify program hotspots, call trees, and data dependencies which will shape achievable parallelism.
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2. Explore
Before modifying any code, explore different parallel scenarios. What if this function ran in a separate thread? What if these dependencies were removed? Understand the benefits and select the best strategy.
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3. Code
Implement the chosen parallelization strategy. Use existing development tools without change.
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4. Verify
Confirm that the implementation safely achieved the desired results. Functions properly threaded and dependencies removed? Any potential data races? Synchronization bottlenecks?
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5. Tune
Analyze opportunities for further parallelization by reapplying the previous steps.
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The Benefits
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- Gain more insight, waste less time – analyze many different parallelization scenarios before making any code changes. Verify parallel objectives are properly achieved.
- Augment the way you already work – there are no new languages or proprietary extensions to learn. Start with existing serial or parallel code – mix standard C, C++, assembly, or even binary objects. Use familiar development tools and libraries. Prism integrates with Eclipse for maximum portability.
- Visualize possible schedules and pinpoint dependency relationships – parallel programming is about relationships. Understand synchronization between threads, and go directly to the source to see dependency relationships which must be properly maintained.
- Design for scalability and reuse – develop parallelization which scales across varying number of cores. Eliminate potential race conditions which could fail as data sources and processing resources change.
- Apply precision when needed – platform support ranges from instruction-accurate application analysis to highly specialized and system-accurate SoC and board support packages.
- Boost your parallel IQ – Prism comes with on-line documentation and practical case studies. Supplemental services are available to instill practical parallel practices or augment development teams.
Platform Support Packages
Prism is engineered to work with different processors, programming models, operating systems, development boards and system environments. Prism capabilities are enabled through platform support packages (PSPs).
Instruction PSPs are designed to support general instruction set architectures and are intended for quick application parallelization. ARM, Freescale Power, Intel x86-32, MIPS32 and Renesas SH4 processors are supported with more on the way.
Core PSPs enhance Prism by providing additional accuracy through the introduction of hardware awareness into the core modeling. Hardware awareness extensions might include data cache miss impact analysis, hardware threading impact analysis, multicore tracing support, and multicore trace extraction.
System PSPs further enhance Prism for production SoCs and boards. Platform analysis extensions might include configurable full system modeling, power analysis, custom scheduling, specialized parallel programming models, and operating system and board level integration. The Toshiba Venezia PSP is an example which supports Venezia’s proprietary threading API and cache coherence validation.
Pricing
Prism pricing starts at $200/month for an Instruction PSP and a minimum one year node locked license. Additional open source or commercial boards, virtual machines, or simulators may be required. Core and System PSPs are developed in collaboration with chip and system providers and are priced individually but are typically $400/month and $600/month respectively.
Prism is available directly from CriticalBlue or through platform providers for certain PSPs.
System Requirements
PC with at least 1GB memory. Windows or Linux operating system.