Europractice adopts vfAnalyst for cloud EDA

LONDON – Vector Fabrics BV (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) has announced that its internet-based vfAnalyst tool is now available to researchers across Europe and beyond on a contract with the Europractice EDA software service.

The vfAnalyst is a tool for parallelizing sequential C code that enables software engineers to identify the most promising parallelization opportunities and create effective multicore implementations quickly. The software is hosted on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, a secure server facility accessed through a standard web browser.

The European Commission funded Europractice project provides academic and research institutions with access to leading-edge manufacturing, which they otherwise could not get due to the low volumes they require. It does this by organizing multi-project wafer (MPW) runs out of Europe and by providing access to leading-edge EDA software.

Under this agreement, vfAnalyst will be available to over 530 universities and 100 research institutes across 44 countries.

The software can be used by research staff and students in implementing algorithms, protocols on multicore and heterogeneous platforms. The tool's graphical interface helps identify which portions of the program can be run in parallel, and what kinds of data communications are needed in order to ensure that the multi-threaded code will operate identically to – but much faster than – the sequential code.

"Our scientists want to get access to the highest-performance processing capabilities in multicore server architectures, GPGPU, DSP, FPGA and embedded application processors," said John McLean, head of the microelectronics support centre at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory which provides the Europractice software service.