An efficient protocol with synchronization accelerator for multi-processor embedded systems

• We design a multi-core real-time operating system (RTOS), and an efficient protocol between parallel programs and the RTOS.
• The protocol define a parallel programming model and reduce the complexity of parallel programming.
• We implement a control subnet to accelerate synchronization between parallel tasks.
• Experimental results indicate that the accelerating mechanism is efficient.

With the proliferation of multi-processor core systems, parallel programming imposes a difficult challenge where current solutions are far from being considered efficient. In order to alleviate the difficulty of parallel programming, we propose a scheduler, which is part of a master–slave RTOS, to efficiently manage the parallel programs running on a multi-processor core system. We also propose an efficient protocol that serves as the interface between the operating system and application programs. This interface protocol runs on a dedicated control subnet to cut down the synchronization overhead between the parallel tasks. Such synchronization overhead incurred in these multi-core parallel systems has been recognized as one of the severe limiting factors when pushing up the performance envelope. Experimental results, obtained from the register-transfer level simulations of various benchmark parallel programs, show that the proposed protocol and the control subnet can improve the system efficiency by up to 33.5%. This protocol, as it is designed to be compatible with the minimum subset of the massage-passing interface functions (MPI), scales well with the number of cores.