PolyCore MCAPI offers ThreadX RTOS support

Through a joint development effort between Express Logic and PolyCore Software, Poly-Messenger/MCAPI now provides MCAPI support for applications running Express Logic's ThreadX RTOS. Poly-Messenger/MCAPI provides efficient standardized communication between application threads running on ThreadX, across multiple instantiations of ThreadX, and/or multiple OS instantiations across multiple cores. By providing developers with a real-time multicore development platform, Express Logic and PolyCore Software have made a significant step in addressing multicore software development challenges.

"The Poly-Messenger/MCAPI—ThreadX combination is the first commercial MCAPI RTOS integration to reach the market, and represents an exciting next step towards MCAPI industry adoption," commented Markus Levy, president of The Multicore Association. "The Association was founded in 2006 with the objective of enabling standardized commercial products to be made available for developer use. It's a great pleasure to see this implementation result from our two years of MCAPI development and marks a great success for the Association."

To speed development, Poly-Messenger/MCAPI enables applications to be developed and functionally debugged on a single processor or simulator using virtual nodes and subsequently deployed on multicore target hardware. Application development and migration can thus start before availability of target hardware and functional debugging and application scaling is simplified. Changing from virtual nodes to target hardware is simple using PolyCore Software's Poly-Generator topology generator. Whether moving existing single processor applications to a multicore architecture or developing new multicore applications, developers benefit from the run-time solutions and tools provided by Poly-Messenger/MCAPI, Poly-Generator and ThreadX that reduce their risk, development costs, and time-to-market.

In addition, Poly-Messenger/MCAPI and Poly-Generator enable application developers to design, program, and manage communications in multicore systems. Poly-Messenger/MCAPI supports different logical and physical onchip network structures that allow migration of applications from a single- to multicore architectures. Poly-Generator helps the developer to easily manage the communications topology for optimal performance throughout the development process. Poly-Messenger/MCAPI provides a platform for reuse of legacy code, offering developers a much-needed migration path where previously written single-processor multithreaded code can be optimally distributed across multiple cores. Poly-Messenger/MCAPI offers a unified standard interface, providing an abstraction layer to the underlying interconnections.

"We are excited to offer ThreadX support in Poly-Messenger/MCAPI, the first MCAPI implementation providing consistent and efficient multicore communication for ThreadX-based applications," stated Sven Brehmer, president and CEO of PolyCore Software and chairman for the Multicore Association's MCAPI working group. "Express Logic is the RTOS of choice in small footprint, resource-constrained applications. Together, we provide a more efficient and scalable multicore solutions for the embedded market."

"As multicore systems become more prevalent in high-performance embedded computing, Poly-Messenger/MCAPI enables ThreadX to help address the software challenges of these systems with a standardized, easy-to-use API that is both efficient and scalable," commented William E. Lamie, president of Express Logic. "Through this integration, developers can choose to use ThreadX alone or alongside any other Poly-Messenger/MCAPI-supported OS to more easily program multicore applications."

Keywords: RTOS   multicore communications API   embedded application