What if you could have:

• The ease-of-use of a scripting language?
• The performance of a vendor-optimized math library?
• The portability of an open architecture API?

Now you can with Sourcery VSIPL++™.

Learn more about the performance, productivity, and portability benefits of Sourcery VSIPL++.

Easy and Fast: Can It Be Done?

In 2003, the Department of Defense issued a challenge: Build software for parallel embedded systems that is both (1) object oriented and (2) high performance.

An object-oriented approach, with more compact syntax and without explicit memory management or message-passing, was expected to make programming parallel embedded systems easier. But could it also go fast? Or would C++ add too much performance overhead relative to C or assembly language?

CodeSourcery accepted the challenge. As a member of the VSIPL Forum, CodeSourcery drafted the specification for the open standard VSIPL++ API, and CodeSourcery was confident that an optimized implementation of the VSIPL++ API could perform as well as or better than a C library.

Over the next three years, CodeSourcery received a Phase I SBIR award, a Phase II SBIR award, and a Phase II SBIR extension to develop a high performance C++ library implementing the portable, high productivity VSIPL++ API.

The result: Sourcery VSIPL++. With its sophisticated implementation techniques, including expression templates, loop fusion, operation fusion, and a dispatch engine that can take advantage of low-level math libraries, Sourcery VSIPL++ achieved the goal of high performance.

An Air Force SBIR/STTR Innovation Storyexpounds on the benefits of CodeSourcery's technology. Sourcery VSIPL++ will provide the Air Force and its contractors with a way to write faster, more reliable code that can run on hardware platforms available today and in the future, the report states. As a result, this technology will make it cheaper, faster, and easier for the Air Force to develop software in the future.

The innovation story does not end there, though. In 2008, CodeSourcery received another Phase I SBIR award. This time the challenge was to develop extensions to Sourcery VSIPL++ for next generation multi-core processors, including the Cell Broadband Engine processor.