Adapteva gets multi-core programming boost
SWARM stands for Swift Adaptive Runtime Machine and it provides an intermediate layer programming environment that supports application development. ETI (Newark, Delaware) provides SWARM as part of a range of services including processor design and custom programming services for high-performance and embedded computing systems.
ETI has spent more than a decade working on massively parallel programming research for the Department of Defense, and currently provides software, applications and custom engineering services to the energy, defense, semiconductor, digital media, and financial markets.
The current implementation of Epiphany is as an accelerator for DSP tasks such as speech recognition and imaging processing. It packs 16 custom floating-point cores in a 65-nm chip that can deliver up to 50-GFLOPS while consuming less than a watt, according to Adapteva (Lexington, MA). The claim for Epiphany is that it is more power efficient than competitive chips and that the architecture scales to many-core.
"ETI has developed a world-class solution to the multicore programming problem," said Andreas Olofsson, CEO and founder of Adapteva, in a statement issued by ETI "The Epiphany microprocessor redefined the meaning of real-time computing and will allow for the introduction of advanced applications not even feasible on current quad-core devices – but none of these applications will be possible without an efficient and scalable programming environment. After designing the architecture, we had to find the software solution that would allow developers to fully utilize the power of the parallel environment to create more sophisticated applications. ETI’s SWARM technology provides the combined ease-of-programming and specialized many-core capacity necessary to deliver this development capability."
"The possibilities for many-core processors are limitless, and ETI’s SWARM technology enables efficient application execution on even the most complex of these architectures," said Rich Collier, COO of ETI, in the same statement. "SWARM has been proven on some of the most advanced many-core systems in the world, and we are eager to bring its power to Adapteva’s processor for HPC, embedded computing, and other emerging many-core environments."
For further information: www.etinternational.com, www.adapteva.com.