MontaVista integrates multi-core analysis plugin

By Eric Brown
2009-12-21

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MontaVista Software LLC announced a partnership with CriticalBlue to integrate the latter's embedded multi-core analysis Eclipse plug-in into the MontaVista DevRocket integrated development environment (IDE). The CriticalBlue Prism plug-in enables MontaVista Linux customers to run simulations to analyze and tune the behavior of their code on multi-core processors, says MontaVista.

Prism will be offered as an Eclipse plugin for MontaVista's DevRocket IDE to enable development of multi-core ready software using MontaVista Linux 6 and MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition. The deal also calls for Edinburgh, Scotland based CriticalBlue, which has never before had its software integrated with a commercial embedded Linux development platform, to join MontaVista's partner program. says the new Cavium subsidiary.

The Prism announcement comes only a few days after MontaVista was acquired by Cavium Networks, in the process gaining a suffix of LLC (limited liability company).

Prism code analysis (left) and features used to explore different parallelization scenarios (right)
(Click on either to enlarge)

"The Prism tools allow developers to analyze code and graphically see where code which is sequential could run in parallel," said MontaVista director of marketing Dean Misenhimer in an interview. "The software lets you decide how many cores you want to run on. You can edit code with the same tool, and download to a real target, so that whole integration is really seamless. We think this will be huge."

Prism uses dynamic tracing of the software execution to analyze the behavior of existing sequential code running on either hardware development boards or simulators, says MontaVista. Developers can characterize a serial or parallel application on real workloads, and then identify hotspots, call trees, and data dependencies that could be leveraged to achieve parallelism.

Prism enables exploration of multiple opportunities for concurrency on multi-core processors, and helps identify optimal strategies to implement parallel structures, says the company. Later, once the multi-core code has been developed, developers can then return to Prism to "verify efficient and thread-safe operations," says MontaVista. They can then further tune the code for optimum performance.

Prism lets developers verify code (left) and then later tune its execution (right)
(Click on either to enlarge)

Stated David Stewart, CEO, CriticalBlue, "By partnering with MontaVista, and integrating with the MontaVista DevRocket IDE, Prism will support the broadest range of platforms on a commercial quality Linux, allowing our joint customers a way to rapidly ensure safe and timely migration of their software onto multi-core platforms and efficient exploitation of the parallelism inherent within."

Availability

As sold by CriticalBlue, Prism is available today on Linux and Windows platforms, starting at $200 per month with "one core PSP and a minimum one year license." Prism today supports ARM and MIPS cores, with support for several other leading multi-core processor architectures coming in Q1 2010, says the company.

MontaVista did not detail when the Prism plug-in would be available integrated with MontaVista DevRocket, nor did it list pricing.

More information on Prism may be found at Critical Blue, here. More information on MontaVista DevRocket may be found here.

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