Parallelism extraction in embedded software for android devices

Abstract

In the last years the presence of embedded devices in everyday life has grown exponentially. The market of these devices imposes conflicting requirements such as cost, performance and energy. The use of Multiprocessor Systems on Chip (MPSoCs) is a widely accepted solution to provide a trade-off between these demands. However, programming MPSoCs is still a cumbersome task. Several research efforts have addressed this challenge in two complementary directions: paradigms for parallel programming and tools for parallelism extraction. However, most of these efforts are focused on the high performance domain and they do not consider the characteristics of the underlying platform. In this paper, we present an approach to extract multiple forms of parallelism from sequential C code, which is applied to widespread Android mobile devices. We show the effectiveness of our work by parallelizing relevant embedded benchmarks on a quad-core Nexus 7 tablet.