Parallel Lines

Enea has upped the parallel processing support of its Polyhedra relational database management system (RDBMS) for network infrastructure systems.

Polyhedra v7.0 is tuned for multi-processor systems by supporting parallel execution of queries and transactions.

The in-memory, transactional RDBMS is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and it will execute out of local RAM so should run smooth.

Polyhedra 7.0 is available immediately for a broad range of operating systems, including OSE, VxWorks, Integrity, Linux, Windows and Unix.

Intel has made its C++ programming tool for multi-core processors available as an open source project under the GNU General Public License version two (GPLv2) with the runtime exception.

The Threading Building Blocks (TBBs) are designed to aid parallel programming for C++ programmers. It uses generic programming, and allows express tasks instead of threads. This effectively simplifies multi-threaded programming.

There is no real surprise to see Linux being adopted like the bargin of the century by the mobile phone industry.

The possibility to standardise on an essentially royalty-free, open source operating system for the next generation of PC-like mobile phones is too good to ignore.

But once again the naturally commercially aggressive chip companies have taken a simple concept and made it too complicated for its own good.

AMD is the latest big name in the PC industry to jump into tthe open source software community. The processor company is to participate in the Eclipse Foundation.

Does this endotrsement make Eclipse the only show in town for embedded system designers looking to go open source?

Embedded computing firm Vmetro is proposing to simplify the development of multi-processor systems by changing the way data is transferred to the shared memory.

The company's FusionIPC processor-to-processor comms software handles both bulk data movement and message passing in a small footprint without requiring application involvement.

“Similar to other existing approaches, FusionIPC is built upon a shared memory buffer model but differs in that it combines coordination of bulk data movement with messaging and signals without application involvement,” commented Mike Jadon, CTO of embedded systems at Vmetro.

Do designers consider multi-core architecture support as a critical factor in the choice of embedded operating systems? Not generally, says market research firm Venture Development Corporation (VDC).   

Multi-core architectures are increasingly being used by designers but the availability of software support for multi-processing systems seems to be of relatively low importance even to those developers who indicated that they were using a multi-core or multi-core and multiprocessor design.