Multicore comms spec gets an update
"Our original MCAPI specification has seen enthusiastic uptake with more than 1,000 downloads," said Markus Levy, president of the Multicore Association. "Extensive member feedback, combined with our ongoing dialog with users, was instrumental in driving the enhancements that we have included in version 2.0," he said.
MCAPI provides inter-process communication within embedded systems where resources are scarce. It specifies a network a node that can be a process, thread, instance of an operating system, hardware accelerator, or processor core.
MCAPI Version 2.0 adds the concept of domains that can be used in a variety of ways. Domains can represent all the cores on a given chip or be used for dividing a topology into public and secure areas, giving designers more control over the routing and security of their messages.
The spec also increases runtime flexibility through the introduction of three new types of initialization parameters. The MCAPI working group made a number of other changes, some of them aimed at ensuring type compatibility with the consortium’s new multicore resource API (MRAPI) standard.
"Even as we release version 2.0, we are already developing future enhancements," said Sven Brehmer, chairman of the MCAPI working group and chief executive of PolyCore Software.
MCAPI was originally launched in April 2008. It is available as OpenMCAPI in open source code under a BSD license as well as being used in various commercial tools from PolyCore and others.
The Multicore Association provides an example implementation in the form of an application library created with the C programming language.
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