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\mainpage Overview

The Embedded Multicore Building Blocks (EMB<sup>2</sup>) are an easy to
use yet powerful and efficient C/C++ library for the development of
parallel applications. EMB<sup>2</sup> has been specifically designed
for embedded systems and the typical requirements that accompany them,
such as real-time capability and constraints on memory consumption. As a
major advantage, low-level operations are hidden in the library which
relieves software developers from the burden of thread management and
synchronization. This not only improves productivity of parallel
software development, but also results in increased reliability and
performance of the applications.

EMB<sup>2</sup> is independent of the hardware architecture (x86, ARM,
...) and runs on various platforms, from small devices to large systems
containing numerous processor cores. It builds on MTAPI, a standardized
programming interface for leveraging task parallelism in embedded
systems containing symmetric or asymmetric multicore processors. A core
feature of MTAPI is low-overhead scheduling of fine-grained tasks among
the available cores during runtime. Unlike existing libraries,
EMB<sup>2</sup> supports task priorities, which allows the creation of
soft real-time systems. Additionally, the scheduling strategy can be
optimized for non-functional requirements such as minimal latency and
fairness.

Besides the task scheduler, EMB<sup>2</sup> provides basic parallel
algorithms, concurrent data structures, and skeletons for implementing
stream processing applications (see figure below). These building blocks
are largely implemented in a non-blocking fashion, thus preventing
frequently encountered pitfalls like lock contention, deadlocks, and
priority inversion. As another advantage in real-time systems, the
algorithms and data structures give certain progress guarantees. For
example, wait-free data structures guarantee system-wide progress which
means that every operation completes within a finite number of steps
independently of any other concurrent operations on the same data
structure.

\image html ../images/embb.png

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