Supporting OpenMP on a multi-cluster embedded MPSoC

The ever-increasing complexity of MPSoCs is putting the production of software on the critical path in embedded system development. Several programming models and tools have been proposed in the recent past that aim to facilitate application development for embedded MPSoCs. OpenMP is a mature and easy-to-use standard for shared memory programming, which has recently been successfully adopted in embedded MPSoC programming as well. To achieve performance, however, it is necessary that the implementation of OpenMP constructs efficiently exploits the many peculiarities of MPSoC hardware, and that custom features are provided to the programmer to control it. In this paper we consider a representative template of a modern multi-cluster embedded MPSoC and present an extensive evaluation of the cost associated with supporting OpenMP on such a machine, investigating several implementation variants that are aware of the memory hierarchy and of the heterogeneous interconnection. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.