What multicore and longitude have in common

12/2/2008 2:44 PM EST

In a column a year ago (www.embedded.com/201800330), Bernie Cole compared the state of multicore software tools to the Charge of the Light Brigade: current tools "are as outdated and useless as the sabers, one-shot pistols, and horses of the ill-fated 600 were against cannon, repeating rifles, and mechanized equipment they rode against."

While it's not a bad comparison, perhaps a better analogy may be navigating by sea. First, we figured out that the world was round. Then we developed tools to measure longitude to actually figure out where we had come from, where we were, and where we were going. Prior to that, sailors mostly kept within sight of shore or risked getting lost and foundering on some unexpected rocky shore. Those famous sailors, such as Columbus, Magellan, and Cook who successfully navigated large distances over open water, owed their success to luck and pluck more than knowing with certainty where they were and where they were going. And for all the successes we learned about in our history books, there were many more navigational failures.

In addition to death and human suffering due to scurvy, as Dava Sobel points out in her book Longitude, " the global ignorance of longitude wreaked economic havoc on the grandest scale." Ships crossing the oceans were confined to a few well-known passages, well known by the pirates and navies in addition to the merchants.

Similarly with multicore, designers have kept close to shore, adding more processing power only to use it for a new, specified application. No sharing of those resources because maybe the earth is flat. And, if we share processor and memory resources, the monsters of the deep will devour us.

While we know that the electronics world is round, there are dangers to navigating in open water, but they aren't imaginary monsters. Now it's time for metrics and for tools and a methodology to be developed to help software developers navigate the multicore waters. Otherwise, the consequences of not having the tools and methodology to enable full utilization of multicore platform resources could be catastrophic, delaying new generations of products that help drive the global economy.