An Implementation of Message-Passing Interface over VxWorks for Real-Time Embedded Multi-Core Systems

Message-passing interface (MPI) has proved to be very successful in the high performance computing domain. However, suitability of MPI for embedded real-time system design is still under investigation. In this work, we have provided our methods and experiences of implementing MPI parallel environment for a real-time embedded multi-core system. Our main contributions were to: (1) enable hyper transport bus communication mechanism to establish MPI parallel environment; (2) support VxWorks operating system for establishing MPI parallel environment and (3) enhance the real-time property of MPI mechanism. The digital signal processor (DSP)-MPI presented in this work can also be used on other platforms supporting VxWorks operating system. The results indicate that the real-time property of DSP-MPI has been improved significantly compared with MPICH2. The test on realistic applications also shows that DSP-MPI can fulfill the requirement of our target multi-core platform.