Is shared memory programming attainable on clusters of embedded processors?

The wide increase of total processing cores in commodity processors tends to lighten the need for computer performance by the classical scientific problems as well as by the modern multimedia and every day embedded applications. Nevertheless, the introduction of this powerful and promising technology seems to inherit and in some cases magnify all the classical problems that already exist on the programming side of these environments. In this work we present a portable environment based on the Java platform targeting to mitigate the performance loss associated with the programming models used in modern multicore systems. We propose a shared memory model for programming modern multicore and distributed environments, presuming only minor interventions by the application programmer. We finally prove that when we use shared memory programming with a widely accepted programming language like Java, we can achieve at least comparable performance with classical though more sophisticated technologies.