Establishing a standard interface between multi-manycore and software tools - SHIM

The multicore processors are becoming norm and a processor with even more than a hundred of cores are emerging. These inherently require wide range of software tools to help software developers. However, supporting these complex hardware by the tools require significant effort by the tool vendors, and each invest in adapting the new hardware by modifying their tools or creating proprietary configuration files, while often the similar set of hardware architectural information are needed. The SHIM, Software-Hardware Interface for Multi-many-core, is a joint industrial and academic effort to standardize the interface between the multicore hardware and the software tools. This extended abstract introduces SHIM, the overall architecture, the schema used, the use-cases, and a prototype tool to foster the adaption of the interface.