Evaluation of message passing synchronization algorithms in embedded systems

Paper in proceeding, 2014

The constantly increasing computational power of the embedded systems is based on the integration of a large number of cores on a single chip. In such complex platforms, the synchronization of the accesses of the shared memory data is becoming a major issue, since it affects the performance of the whole system. This problem, which is currently a challenge in the embedded systems, has been studied in the High Performance Computing domain, where several message passing algorithms have been designed to efficiently avoid the limitations coming from locking. In this work, inspired from the work on message passing synchronization algorithms in the High Performance Computing domain we design and evaluate a set of synchronization algorithms for multi-core embedded platforms. We compare them with the corresponding lock-based implementations and prove that message passing synchronization algorithms can be efficiently utilized in multi-core embedded systems. By using message passing synchronization instead of lock-based, we managed to reduce the execution time of our benchmark up to 29.6%.