BANGALORE, INDIA: The shift in hardware to multi-core processors and multiprocessor systems calls for new software and systems development tools to help developers transform their code into parallel applications and gain performance increases.

Developers now have to know how to create software and architect systems that can use parallel hardware efficiently.

Future systems will be comprised of software stacks running on small (or large) shared-memory nodes, communicating with other nodes over various types of interconnects, and building a system-level software abstraction on top of the multi-core and distributed hardware.

Note that a software structure such as this can be used within a single multi-core hardware device.

The trends toward virtualization and hypervisors in multi-core hardware make it possible to have several isolated groups of cores run their own shared-memory abstraction, looking at other groups of cores as remote network nodes, even if they physically exist within the same silicon package.

Virtualized Systems Development
A virtual platform provides benefits such as freedom from physical constraints, arbitrary configurability, check-pointing and restarting at any point, superior convenience and stability, access to the target long before prototype hardware, and the ability to test faults and boundary cases with complete control and precision.

Virtualized systems development is a development methodology where the actual hardware of a system is augmented by a Wind River Simics virtual platform, a simulation model of the hardware running on a workstation or a PC.

The virtual platform can run the same binary software as the physical hardware, fast enough to be used as an alternative and augment physical hardware for software development.

Doing multi-core hardware right is not easy, but it is certainly easier than doing multi-core software right. There are three main problems:

* Ensuring existing software keeps working (without taking advantage of multi-core)
* Parallelizing existing software to get the performance and power consumption benefits of multi-core parallel execution
* Creating new software that is parallel from the beginning