Migrating to SMP - porting and optimising an application to get significant speedup via SMP

Workshop Overview

This workshop will introduce you to the process of migrating an application running in UP (single-core) mode to run in SMP (symmetric multi-processing) mode, taking advantage of the multiple cores to gain an increase in performance. Attendees will use Wind River's Workbench to work through the process of migrating an application from UP to SMP by:
- Analysing the execution of a UP application identifying the parts that should be parallelized.
- Using advanced tools to identify run-time problems that arise when migrating an application from UP to SMP mode.
- Using multi-context debugger capabilities to simplifying the process of debugging multiple cores / CPU's system The workshop will use Wind River VxWorks SMP operating system but the concepts covered are broad and the lessons learnt will be found useful when using a wide range of embedded operating systems.

Workshop Objectives

Just like in the desktop and laptop arena, adoption of multicore processors in Embedded Systems is becoming increasing widespread. The advantages are well understood : a promise of higher performance, at a lower cost and within a smaller space budget.
However, this promise comes at the cost of higher complexity and, potentially, a longer and more complex development cycle.

This is equally true when migrating an existing UP (uniprocessor or single-core) application to a multi-core device. Such a migration effort is complex and engineers are required to understand how their code (which was almost certainly written for a UP system) will react when running on a multicore system.

During this workshop you will have an opportunity to use Wind River's Workbench development environment to learn more about how multi-core systems differ from single-core systems and how to unlock the power of multiple cores and speed up their application through the use of a Symmetric Multiprocessing Processing (SMP) operating system.

Who should attend:
- software engineers wishing to understand the issues encountered when moving their applications from a single-core to a multi-core system
- system engineers wishing to understand how their applications could benefit from mutli-core technology

Pre-requisites:
- an understanding of "C" programming
- general knowledge of an RTOS (preferably VxWorks) or other embedded operating system and their associated development tools

Course materials:
- workbook

Duration:
3hrs (including a coffee break)

(This workshop is £95+VAT per delegate - payable in advance of the event.)

Click here to go to registration page

About the trainer :

Paul Tingey is a System Architect with Wind River in the UK. He has been with Wind River for more than nine years and now works within the Alliances team to strengthen the bonds between Wind River's products and those of our strategic silicon and hardware partners. Paul's professional interests include standards-based technologies (such as Carrier Grade Linux and AdvancedTCA) as well as real-time technologies such as VxWorks.