Workshop on programming many-multi-parallel-distributed systems

EDN Europe, 19 Dec 2011

On 16th January 2012, embedded system software company Altreonic will present a workshop at IMEC in Leuven, Belgium. The workshop, Altreonic says, “Aims at debunking the myth that writing concurrent programs for many-core, multi-core, parallel and distributed (embedded) systems is difficult. On the contrary, a single approach with a solid formal basis can handle them all, including reusing existing sequential code.”
Altreonic’s core product is OpenComRTOS Designer, according to the company’s website, a “formally-developed network-centric real-time programming environment [that] supports from small microcontrollers to multicore CPUs and networked distributed heterogeneous systems with a very small code size in a topology independent way.”
The workshop will first explain how software writing is really developing a software model of a real (or virtual) system. Such systems are often inherently concurrent and can be expressed as a set of "interacting entities". To formally analyse such systems we can go back to the abstraction provided by process algebras like Hoare's CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes), but often that is not needed if the programming environment provides a consistent API (Application Programming Interface) that hides the details while shielding the software engineer from erroneous side-effects.
In a second part [of the workshop] the different types of concurrent programming will be explained. While multi-core design often target data-parallelism, many-core and distributed architectures are typically used for functional parallelism. This also makes clear that concurrent programming always involves a form of communication with the computation to communication ratio being a key parameter. In addition, embedded systems will need to meet real-time constraints and this can only be achieved if the real-time properties are taking into account at the system level.
Finally, the concepts will be illustrated by way of OpenComRTOS Designer, supported by a visual development environment, code generators and profiling tools. It allows concurrent but transparent programming of heterogeneous targets, ranging from small memory starved microcontroller nodes to multi-core host-nodes running a full blown general purpose OS, all connected in a single networked system.
The workshop attendees will provide hands-on experience running and developing small multiprocessor OpenComRTOS applications on a PC and attached ARM boards. The attendees can take the Win32 version home for free.
16th January 2012, 0930-1730. IMEC, Kapeldreef 75, 3001 Leuven, Belgium; participation is free, although places are limited; register at;
http://mc4es.khbo.be/content/workshop-concurrent-embedded-programming.
Or enquire via; www.altreonic.com