A speed-up study for a parallelized white light interferometry preprocessing algorithm on a virtual embedded multiprocessor system

Parallel computing has been a niche for scientific research in academia for decades. However, as common industrial applications become more and more performance demanding and raising the clock frequency of conventional single-core systems is hardly an option due to reaching technological limitations, efficient use of (embedded) multi-core CPUs and many-core platforms has become imperative. 3D surface analysis of objects using the white light interferometry presents one of such challenging applications. The goal in this article is to get an impression which speed-up for an established and parallelized white light interferometry preprocessing algorithm, called Contrast Method, is possible on an embedded system that works without any operating system. Therefore, we decided to use a virtual environment that is able to simulate embedded multi-core as well as many-core systems and that enables running real application code on the designed system. The results show, that a significant speedup is possible when using a many-core platform, instead of a design that only implements one single core, if the algorithm is parallelized for getting full advantage of the many-core design. Furthermore, an acceptable absolute run time is achievable.