A group of high-tech European companies, backed by EU funding, is to pursue parallel processing for the consumer world using the Cell microprocessor co-developed by IBM, Toshiba and Sony, STMicroelectronics’ streaming processor, and NXP’s Ne-XVP parallel processor.

NXP Semiconductors, STMicro­electronics, Nokia, INRIA, IBM Haifa Research Lab and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya have got together to pursue a project called Acotes (Advanced Compiler Technologies for Embedded Streaming).

“Creating standalone compilers that optimise parallel computing in a programme has proven to be too difficult in the past,” said Acotes project leader, Harm Munk, who works in corporate research for NXP Semiconductors.

“We’re playing with the idea that if an applications programmer has a parallel application, the compiler gives hints to the programmer to find a good way of partitioning the tasks across the processors.”

Munk pointed out that, at the moment, parallel programming delivers an 80/20 result, ie that, 80 per cent of the time, 20 per cent of the hardware is doing something.

The aim of the project will be to increase the utilisation of the hardware while substantially reducing software complexity to bring the power of parallel processing to battery-powered consumer devices.

The overall goal is to substantially improve the programmer’s efficiency in developing applications that process massive streams of data on programmable, parallel embedded architectures.

Target applications are video processing and advanced radio comms for consumer systems.

The 450 person months project is partly funded under the European Union’s Sixth Framework IST programme and partly by the project members. It is an open source project.

“We want to share our developments with members of the open source community and tap into their knowledge, especially their expertise in compilers,” said Munk.