Compilation Strategies and Challenges for Multicore Signal Processing [abstract] (Original Full Paper, PDF)
Mojtaba Mehrara, Thomas B. Jablin, Dan Upton, David I. August, Kim Hazelwood, and Scott Mahlke
IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, November 2009.

To overcome challenges stemming from power density and hot spots on the chip, multicore computing platforms have emerged as the ubiquitous computing platform for servers down through embedded systems. Unfortunately, providing multiple cores does not directly translate into increased performance for most applications. The burden is placed on software developers and tools to find and exploit coarse-grain parallelism in order to effectively make use of the abundance of computing resources provided by these systems. Concurrent applications are much more complex to develop than their single-threaded ancestors, thus software development tools will be critical to help programmers create both high performance and correct software. This article provides an overview multicore parallelism and compiler technology for the signal processing community.