Multicore: It's the Software

This week's news about a company named Tilera focused on two fronts: It is a MIT spin-off and its first release is a 64-core (yes, I said "64-core") processor called the Tile64. But focusing on these two issues somewhat misses the point. The real news about Tilera is the software -- specifically, its Multicore Development Environment (MDE).

MDE is an ANSI C-based multicore programming environment that lets you take advantage of the parallel processing potential of the Tile64 architecture. Tilera claims that "old" multicore models required all operations to be done in a core-by-core fashion, making it difficult to efficiently program, debug, or profile any more than a handful of cores. At least for the Tilera processor, MDE changes this by providing a "gentle slope" that addresses both performance and ease of programming.

MDE does sound familiar, what with ANSI C, a SMP version of Linux, Eclipse, and command-line tools like GDB, Gprof, and oprofile. Tilera has also added a parallel debugger and a parallel profiler, among other tools. But even with these tools, programming for parallel processors will remain hard. As Tilera's CTO Anant Agarwal, told EE Times' Rick Merritt, "there is no silver bullet in multicore programming." In the meantime, development environments like MDE seem a step in the right direction.

--Jonathan Erickson

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:50 AM  Permalink