Development tools are catching up to multicore
May 13, 2011 —
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Multicore processors, long the mainstay of servers, have made solid inroads on the desktop and even mobile computers, yet the development and QA tools and processes required have historically fallen behind.
Fortunately, that’s beginning to change. And while they’re by no means on every developer’s desktop, there are tools available for multicore programming and debugging. That’s good news, because the challenges of multicore development require both training and software.
Erik Hagersten, CTO of Rogue Wave, while sells tools for multicore development, said that many of the parallel programming problems we see today were solved in the 1990s, but that those solutions required training, understanding and expertise on the part of the developer.
“Parallel processing isn't new. We were building parallel servers at Sun Microsystems, but the difference now is multiprocessing is going to the masses," he said.
"It's not just the experts; it's pretty much everybody. In that respect, we're missing a lot. The experts are doing fine of course, but the mass market isn't ready for this."
And while doctoral theses on parallel programming and the potential for new tools and languages are all very compelling, they do little to help developers who need help today. “Many people are waiting for that magic thing to happen: a new language with new parallelization; improvements for the Javas and the Erlangs," said Hagersten.
"That is happening slowly, but not fast enough, and people need to write their code here and now. The largest problem is non-determinism. How can you fix a bug if you can't recreate it?”
The problem is even more profound in the embedded market, where non-determinism is unacceptable within systems upon which human lives depend, said Greg Rose, vice president of marketing and product management at DDC-I, which sells DO-178B certifiable embedded operating systems and tools for use in flight safety-critical avionics applications.
“To date, most [safety-critical embedded systems] customers using multicore processors are turning one of them off," he said. "They're using it in a single-core implementation due to all these effects. It's really up to the software developers as to how you utilize these extra power granted to you with multicore."
Related Search Term(s): multicore
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