Analyzing and transforming a computer program for executing on asymmetric multiprocessing systems

Abstract

A method is disclosed for transforming a portion of a computer program comprising a list of sequential instructions comprising control code and data processing code and a program separation indicator indicating a point where said sequential instructions may be divided to form separate sections that are capable of being separately executed and that each comprise different data processing code. The m method comprises the steps of: (i) analysing said portion of said program to determine if said sequential instructions can be divided at said point indicated by said program separation indicator and in response to determining that it can: (iia) providing data communication between said separate sections indicated by said program separation indicator, such that said separate sections can be decoupled from each other, such that at least one of said sections is capable of being separately executed by an execution mechanism that is separate from an execution mechanism executing another of said separate sections, said at least one of said sections being capable of generating data and communicating said data to at least one other of said separate sections; and in response to determining it can not: (iib) not performing step (iia). If step (iia) is not performed then a warning may be output, or the program may be amended so it can be separated at that point, or the program separation indicator may be removed and the sections that were to be separated merged.

Description

[0001]This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60 / 853,756, filed Oct. 24, 2006, the entire content of which is hereby incorporated by reference in this application.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]1. Field of the Invention[0003]The field of the invention relates to data processing and in particular to improving the performance of program execution.[0004]2. Description of the Prior Art[0005]It is becoming increasingly difficult to provide programs that are simple to write and yet perform efficiently on complex systems. Such complex systems may comprise a number of different processing or execution units and they may be heterogeneous or asymmetric, with specialised processing units being used to increase energy efficiency and lower gate count. In particular, the programming of embedded systems with their hardware restriction, demand for efficiency and the ever decreasing time to market is becoming a real problem.[0006]It is known in high level computing ...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0054]An additional step of analysing the program to ensure that it can indeed be separated at these points can be helpful and al

Problems solved by technology

It is becoming increasingly difficult to provide programs that are simple to write and yet perform efficiently on complex systems.

In particular, the programming of embedded systems with their hardware restriction, demand for efficiency and the ever decreasing time to market is becoming a real problem.

Clearly such mechanisms have an overhead of area and power.

The architectures of system on chip (SoC) platforms found in high end consumer devices are getting more and more complex as designers strive to deliver compute intensive applications on ever shrinking power budgets.

Workloads running on these platforms require the exploitation of large amounts of heterogeneous parallelism and increasingly irregular memory hierarchies.

The consequence of this is that when the core functionality of an application is mapped to the platform, its logic becomes obscured by the transformations and the glue code used

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