Multicore Association

The Multicore Association, founded in 2005, is a member-funded, non-profit, industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs, specifications, and guidelines that will allow system developers and programmers to adopt multicore technology into their applications more readily .

The consortium provides a neutral forum for vendors and developers who are interested in, working with, and/or proliferating multicore-related products, including processors, infrastructure, devices, software, and applications. Its members represent vendors of processors, operating systems, compilers, development tools, debuggers, ESL/EDA tools, and simulators; and application and system developers.

The consortium’s president is Markus Levy, who is also president of EEMBC, the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium.

Completed Projects

In 2008, the Multicore Communications API working group released the consortium's first specification, referred to as MCAPI. MCAPI™ is a message-passing API that captures the basic elements of communication and synchronization that are required for closely distributed (multiple cores on a chip and/or chips on a circuit board) embedded systems. The target systems for MCAPI™ span multiple dimensions of heterogeneity (e.g., core heterogeneity, interconnect fabric heterogeneity, memory heterogeneity, operating system heterogeneity, software toolchain heterogeneity, and programming language heterogeneity). The MCAPI WG was chaired by Sven Brehmer.

In 2011, the Multicore Resource Management API working group released its first specification, referred to as MRAPI. MRAPI is an industry-standard API that specifies essential application-level resource management capabilities. Multicore applications require this API to allow coordinated concurrent access to system resources in situations where: (1) there are not enough resources to dedicate to individual tasks or processers, and/or (2) the Run_time_(program_lifecycle_phase) system does not provide a uniformly accessible mechanism for coordinating resource sharing. This API is applicable to both SMP and AMP embedded multicore implementations (whereby AMP refers to heterogeneous both in terms of software and hardware). MRAPI (in conjunction with other Multicore Association APIs) can serve as a valuable tool for implementing applications, as well as for implementing such full-featured resource managers and other types of layered services. The MRAPI WG was chaired by Jim Holt.

Active Working Groups

• The Multicore Programming Practices (MPP) working group has a goal to develop a multicore software programming guide for the industry that will aid in improving consistency and understanding of multicore programming issues. Initially the group is working on best practices leveraging the C/C++ language to generate a guide of genuine value to engineers who are approaching multicore programming.

• The Tools Infrastructure (TIWG) working group is defining a common data format and creating standards-based mechanisms to share data across diverse and non-interoperable development tools, specifically related to the interfaces between profiling (computer programming) and analysis/visualization tools. The TIWG is also collaborating with the CE Linux Forum on a reference implementation for a de-facto trace data format standard that TIWG will define.

• The Virtualization working group will focus on defining and optimizing a set of paravirtualization information and functions to communicate with an Embedded Hypervisor. This working group will also focus on a variety of areas that support hypervisor portability and multicore capabilities. These areas will include resource management, load balancing, and debugging APIs.

External links

• Official Multicore Association Website
• Multicore Expo - Leading Edge Technology Conference and Exhibition
• Benchmarking Multicore platforms - EEMBC