Streamlining the OpenMP Programming Model on Ultra-Low-Power Multi-core MCUs

High-level programming models aim at exploiting hardware parallelism and reducing software development costs. However, their adoption on ultra-low-power multi-core microcontroller (MCU) platforms requires minimizing the overheads of work-sharing constructs fine-grained parallel regions. This work tackles this challenge by proposing OMP-SPMD, a streamlined approach for computing enabling OpenMP syntax Single-Program Multiple-Data (SPMD) paradigm. To assess performance improvement, we compare our solution with two alternatives: baseline implementation runtime based fork-join paradigm (OMP-base) version leveraging hardware-specific optimizations (OPM-opt). We benchmarked these libraries Parallel Ultra-Low Power (PULP) MCU, highlighting that improve OMP-base up to 69%. At same time, OMP-SPMD leads an extra improvement 178%.