CriticalBlue, Freescale to streamline and simplify multicore software development

Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley 2010, SAN JOSE, USA: CriticalBlue, a pioneer in embedded multicore software analysis, exploration and verification tools, and Freescale Semiconductor, a global leader in the design and manufacture of embedded semiconductors, have collaborated to make CriticalBlue’s Prism development environment available to support Freescale’s QorIQ multicore processor families.

Software developers will be able to migrate, optimize and verify their existing software applications on Freescale’s multicore platforms based on Power Architecture technology.

As communication equipment vendors migrate from single-core to multicore designs, they face the complex and time consuming task of rewriting their code to work with multiple cores. The addition of Prism support to Freescale’s QorIQ multicore ecosystem will help customers preserve the value of their legacy code while designing with new multicore platforms.

The Prism tool helps eliminate guesswork by profiling the code base and suggesting which routines are best to leave in serial sequence and which ones are candidates for parallel sequencing across multiple cores. With this insight, Freescale customers are able to optimize their software code to achieve maximum hardware performance.

“Our collaboration with CriticalBlue underscores our commitment to help customers ease their transition to sophisticated multicore platforms,” said Sathyan Iyengar, vice president of Software Products for the Freescale Networking and Multimedia Group. “Prism is extremely advanced technology and a valuable and innovative addition to Freescale’s multicore ecosystem.”

Prism is an award-winning Eclipse-based embedded multicore programming system that allows software engineers to easily assess and realize the full potential of multicore processors without significant change to their development flow. Prism analyzes the behavior of code running on hardware development boards, virtual machines or platform simulators. It allows engineers to take their existing sequential code and, before making any changes, explore and analyze opportunities for concurrency.

Freescale’s multicore QorIQ communications platforms are built using high-performance Power Architecture cores and enable a new era of networking innovation where the reliability, security and quality of service for every connection matters. The Freescale QorIQ platforms and roadmap consist of five platforms (P1, P2, P3, P4 and P5) that include single-, dual- and many cores to offer customers a choice of solutions, whether they are ready to move to multicore today or want a smart migration path to get there in the future.

“Freescale’s QorIQ family is meeting with strong market acceptance, and we are pleased to provide QorIQ customers the benefit of our highly advanced technology,” said David Stewart, CEO, CriticalBlue. “With Prism support now in place, Freescale’s customers have the environment they need to establish a migration plan and get their end products with multicore performance to market quickly.”

The Prism development environment allows customers to dynamically trace their existing software applications on a single core model and quickly analyze potential parallelization strategies within the context of their existing software application.

The what-if exploration capabilities of Prism enable the software developer to investigate different thread partitioning points in the code, different numbers of cores and identify the key data dependencies that prevent exploitation of latent concurrency within the application. All of the above steps can be executed on existing sequential software, with no code changes required.

Freescale software developers already using QorIQ multicore platforms have the ability to trace their multithreaded software applications on a single core or a multicore model and quickly analyze potential optimization strategies to improve utilization of the processing resources available on the platform.

In this context, the what-if exploration capabilities of Prism enable the software developer to investigate additional thread partitioning options and different thread management techniques, as well as further analysis of data dependencies in the code.

Prism support for QorIQ is expected to be initially available on simulated models of QorIQ devices, and plans are underway for direct-silicon Prism support for QorIQ in the future. The Core-level Platform Support Package (PSP) for Prism targeting Freescale’s QorIQ processors is offered at a suggested retail price of $400 per month with an annual subscription agreement.