Deploying OpenMP Task Parallelism on Multicore Embedded Systems with MCA Task APIs
Peng Zi Sun, Sunita Chandrasekaran, Suyang Zhu, Barbara Chapman · 2015
Heterogeneous multicore embedded systems are rapidly growing with cores of varying types and capacity. Programming these devices and exploiting the hardware has been a real challenge. The programming models and its execution are typically meant for general purpose computation, they are mostly too heavy to be adopted for the resource-constrained embedded systems. Embedded programmers are still expected to use low-level and proprietary APIs, making the software built less and less portable. These challenges motivated us to explore how OpenMP, a high-level directive-based model, could be used for embedded platforms. In this paper, we translate OpenMP to Multicore Association Task Management API (MTAPI), which is a standard API for leveraging task parallelism on embedded platforms. Our results demonstrate that the performance of our OpenMP runtime library is comparable to the state-of-the-art task parallel solutions. We believe this approach will provide a portable solution since it abstracts the low-level details of the hardware and no longer depends on vendor-specific API.