OpenMP on the Low-Power TI Keystone II ARM/DSP System-on-Chip

The Texas Instrument (TI) Keystone II architecture integrates an octa-core C66X DSP with a quad-core ARM Cortex A15 MPCore processor in a non-cache coherent shared memory environment. This System-on-a-Chip (SoC) offers very high Floating Point Operations per second (FLOPS) per Watt, if used efficiently. This paper reports an initial attempt at developing a bare-metal OpenMP runtime for the C66X multi-core DSP using the Open Event Machine RTOS. It also outlines an extension to OpenMP that allows code to run across both the ARM and the DSP cores simultaneously. Preliminary performance data for OpenMP constructs running on the ARM and DSP parts of the SoC are given and compared with other current processors.