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IBM Rational and Wind River:

Addressing the Challenges of Embedded Software Development

WindRiver

 Reducing the Risk of Multicore Development 

Driven by marketplace demands, many companies are turning to multicore hardware to improve performance while reducing energy consumption. Yet multicore development raises a host of challenges. You must contend with the need for ever increasing functionality, business and technical requirements. Multicore adds many more design options that must be evaluated. And time-to-market constraints, connectivity requirements and safety and security considerations weigh heavily on development teams.

IBM Rational® software—a marketplace-leading platform for software lifecycle management—is teaming with Wind River—the global leader in the embedded and mobile industries—to help companies take the risk out of multicore software development.

Together, Wind River Systems and IBM can provide companies with the hardware-optimized run-time environments, middleware, software development tools and services you need to develop high-performance, maintainable and scalable multicore solutions. Together, Wind River and Rational help developers architect and build devices for the future—building products right the first time, reducing development costs and speeding time-to-market.

The Multicore Paradox

Although multicore hardware offers the opportunity to realize significant price and performance improvements in your products, it makes the product development process more complex. And the wrong architecture for your product can significantly reduce or even eliminate multicore benefits.

Wind River provides a wide range of real-time and general-purpose operating systems that support symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) and virtualization on many different multicore processors. To manage this complexity, development teams needs to be able to quickly evaluate many different combinations including the number of cores and the operating system and configuration (SMP or AMP) and how the application will utilize the hardware and operating system configuration.

To maximize the benefits of multicore and shorten time-to-market, key design trade-offs need to be made early in the development process.

Using a model-driven development approach, IBM Rational and Wind River are teaming to help developers do the following:

  • Use IBM Rational Rhapsody system and software models to describe design options early in the development process.
  • Use the early design models to understand how the software could be executing on a host platform, using different configurations including SMP, AMP, and virtualization on real-time and general purpose operating systems (Wind River’s VxWorks or Linux).
  • Use the understanding gained to make well-funded and well-understood architectural decisions.
  • Use exiting source code to create model elements to reduce development time or to repartition existing code for a multicore solution.
  • Simulate the model to verify that it is correct, and then leverage Wind River’s VxWorks technology to simulate the complete application on a host environment for accurate and quick system validation.
  • Link IBM Rational DOORS product and software requirements directly to models, and use the models to automatically generate code.
  • Create reusable design assets in a shared corporate environment.
  • Trace requirements and changes from model creation through testing and final product release, saving significant development and testing time as well as improving the overall quality of the application.
  • Using a model-driven approach to achieve higher product performance, reduce power consumption, reduce hardware costs, leverage existing intellectual property (IP) and innovate by adding new capabilities to existing devices.

More information about IBM Rational Multicore Solutions

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