Applications for Multicore System

Abstract

A multi-core processor is a single computing unit with two or more processors (“cores”). These cores are integrated into a single IC for enhanced performance, reduced power consumption and more efficient simultaneous processing of multiple tasks. Homogeneous multi-core systems include only identical cores, whereas heterogeneous multi-core systems have cores that are not identical. Most of the computers and workstations these days have multicore processors. However most software programs are not designed to make use of multi-core processors and hence even though we run these programs on the new machines equipped with multicore processors, we don’t see sizable improvements in application performance. The idea behind improved performance is in parallelizing the code and distributing the work amongst multiple cores, but writing programming logic to achieve this is complex. The conventional model of lock-based parallelism for writing such programs is difficult in use, error-prone and does not always lead to efficient use of the resources but with the help of OpenMP, programmers have enhanced support for parallel programming. In this work I have implemented quicksort algorithm using OpenMP library and analysed the performance in terms of execution time.