Abstract
Multicore programming is more difficult than single-core programming, and developing applications on a complex multicore system without using an appropriate development environment is difficult, with the results being highly prone to error. A useful development environment for an embedded application design should contain programming models and development tools. The programming model provides a higher abstract level to control the communication and execution of multicore hardware, while the development tools help developers to debug applications and measure the performance of applications. In this paper, we propose a development environment for embedded multicore systems that includes a heterogeneous multicore simulation platform, customised compiler tools for a VLIW DSP, and a multicore programming model, streaming RPC. The experimental results demonstrate the high performance of the multicore simulation and compiler optimisations. The performance of compiled MiBench with O2 optimisation was 70% relative to no optimisation.©2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.