GrammaTech Awarded DARPA Contract to Develop Static-Analysis Technology for Examining Multi-Core Systems

SAN JOSE, CA, Embedded Systems Conference — GrammaTech, Inc., a leading provider of source-code analysis tools, today announced that it has been awarded a DARPA contract to develop static-analysis technology for examining multi-core systems. The new technology focuses on identifying concurrent programming defects, which are notoriously difficult to identify and manually debug.

Multi-core processors are integrated circuits that contain two or more processor cores. Well-known examples include Intel’s Core 2 Duo, AMD’s Phenom, and Sony, Toshiba and IBM’s (STI’s) Cell Processor. The adoption of multi-core is being fueled by the need for better performance in an age when improvements to the single-processor architecture have already been so dramatic that future improvements are being hampered by the laws of physics. Multi-core processors provide an avenue for improving performance through parallel computation, and they are widely used in multimedia applications, scientific applications and CAD/CAM packages.

Research recently released by Venture Development Corporation (VDC), projects strong revenue growth through 2011 in the market for multi-core CPUs in embedded applications. According to Eric Heikkila, director of VDC’s Embedded Hardware and Software Practice, “The embedded multi-core CPU market very much equates to a billion dollar opportunity over the next five years.”

“The use of multi-core chips is growing, but it is difficult to maximize the full performance of multi-core technology. Software for multi-core processors must be explicitly parallel, and it must account for the low-level details of how the cores pass data between each other and memory. Static analysis can help developers by identifying errors that commonly occur when programming for a multi-core system. Our goal is to provide a static analysis technology that helps developers avoid the increases in development cost, despite the increase in complexity,” said David Melski, VP of Research at GrammaTech.