From sequential programming to flexible parallel execution

Abstract

The embedded computing landscape is being transformed by three trends: growing demand for greater functionality and enriched user experience, increasing diversity and parallelism in the processing substrate, and an accelerating push for ever-greater energy efficiency. For programmers, these trends give rise to three challenges: writing code for a potentially heterogeneous architecture, extracting parallelism in software, and maximizing a multivariate (performance, power, energy, etc.) fitness function of user satisfaction which may vary with time. To meet these challenges, clarion calls have been issued for programmers to start writing software in new parallel programming models. Fundamentally, however, these proposals detract programmers from delivering new features and enriched user experience in the shortest time possible. This paper proposes to attract embedded systems programmers to a vertically integrated approach, comprising extensions to the sequential programming model, a parallelizing compiler, and an optimizing run-time system, to enable them to tackle all three challenges.