LX-MCAPI : biblioteca de comunicação para suporte a programação paralela em sistemas multi-core

Abstract

The multi-core processors represent the industry response for the physical barriers encountered during the development of computing processors during the last decades, and brought new advances on computing system performance. The complex superscalar unicore processors with high frequency clocks gave way to processing units with two or more cores in just one encapsulation, generally with low clock frequencies, allowing one or more execution threads per core. On this context, the existing programming models using serial and concurrent paradigms do not allow exploring the real potential provided by the new hardware elements incorporated, generating a necessity of new programming methodologies that does allow exploring parallelism aggregated by the use of multi-core processors. This work presents LX-MCAPI, a library based on modern IPC (Inter-Process Communication) and memory sharing mechanisms, developed over the hypothesis that message passing is a viable, flexible and scalable abstraction, compared to conventional programming methods using shared-memory on multi-core systems. LX-MCAPI offers a message-passing, zerocopy memory sharing mechanism between processes and ready to use scalability patterns to facilitate the process of abstraction and construction of applications. It has performed well in therms of transmission latency and transfer rate on x86-64 and ARM environments.