In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Peng Sun

will defend his dissertation proposal

High-Level Programming Model for Heterogeneous Embedded Systems using Multicore Industry Standard APIs

Abstract

Multicore embedded systems are rapidly emerging. Hardware designers are packing more and more features into their design. Introducing heterogeneity in these systems, i.e., adding cores of varying types, provides opportunities to solve problems in different aspects. However, this presents several challenges to embedded system programmers since software is still not mature enough to efficiently exploit the capabilities of emerging hardware, rich with cores of varying architectures.

Programmers still rely on understanding and using low-level hardware-specific APIs. This approach is not only very time-consuming but also tedious and error-prone. Moreover, the solutions developed are very closely tied to a particular hardware, raising significant concerns over software portability. What is needed is an industry standard that will enable better programming practices for both current and future embedded systems. To that end, in this proposal, we have explored the possibility of using existing standards, such as OpenMP, that provide portable high-level programming constructs along with the industry-driven standards for multicore systems. We built a portable yet lightweight OpenMP runtime library that incorporates the Multicore Association APIs, making OpenMP programming model available to embedded system programmers with a broad coverage of targeting embedded devices. In this proposal, we propose to explore further how to use industry standards APIs as the mapping layer of OpenMP onto heterogeneous embedded systems, and we propose to build a task scheduler to distribute tasks over both host and target devices efficiently.

Date: Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Time: 1:00 PM
Place: PGH 218
Advisor: Prof. Barbara Chapman

Faculty, students, and the general public are invited.