Evaluating OpenMP Support Costs on MPSoCs

Marongiu A., Burgio P., Benini L.,
(To appear in) Proceedings of the 13th Euromicro Conference on Digital Systems Design (DSD 2010).
The ever-increasing complexity of MPSoCs is making the production of software the critical path in embedded system development. Several programming models and tools have been proposed in the recent past that aim at facilitating application development for embedded MPSoCs. OpenMP is a mature and easy-to-use standard for shared memory programming, which has recently been successfully adopted in embedded MPSoC programming as well. To achieve performance, however, it is necessary that the implementation of OpenMP constructs efficiently exploits the many peculiarities of MPSoC hardware. In this paper we present an extensive evaluation of the cost associated with supporting OpenMP on such a machine, investigating several implementative variants that efficiently exploit the memory hierarchy. Experimental results on different benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of the optimizations in terms of performance improvements.