With the availability of more and more cores within architectures the process of extracting implicit and explicit parallelism in applications to fully utilise these cores is becoming complex. Implicit parallelism extraction is performed through the inclusion of intelligent software and hardware sections of tool chains although these reach their theoretical limit rather quickly. Due to this the concept of a method of allowing explicit parallelism to be performed as fast a possible has been investigated. This method enables application developers to perform creation and synchronisation of parallel sections of an application at a finer-grained level than previously possible, resulting in smaller sections of code being executed in parallel while still reducing overall execution time. Alongside explicit parallelism, a concept of high level design of applications destined for multicore systems was also investigated. As systems are getting larger it is becoming more difficult to design and track the full life-cycle of development. One method used to ease this process is to use a graphical design process to visualise the high level designs of such systems. One drawback in graphical design is the explicit nature in which systems are required to be generated, this was investigated, and using concepts already in use in text based programming languages, the generation of platform-independent models which are able to be specialised to multiple hardware architectures was developed. The explicit parallelism was performed using hardware elements to perform thread management, this resulted in speed ups of over 13 times when compared to threading libraries executed in software on commercially available processors. This allowed applications with large data dependent sections to be parallelised in small sections within the code resulting in a decrease of overall execution time. The modelling concepts resulted in the saving of between 40-50% of the time and effort required to generate platform-specific models while only incurring an overhead of up to 15% the execution cycles of these models designed for specific architectures.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:588060 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Stevens, David |
| Publisher | Loughborough University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/13746 |
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