Dave Stewart and Skip Hovsmith of CriticalBlue originally developed technology to take software and pull it out of the code and implement it in gates. They had some limited success with this. But now they have refocused their technology on the problem of taking legacy code and helping make it multicore ready with their Prism tool.
They do this by running the code and storing a trace of what goes on for later analysis. Previously they have done this only through simulation but now they can also use hardware boards to run the code. They don’t need a multicore CPU, just one with the same instruction set. Having developed the trace they can do “what if there were 4 cores, or 32” type analysis without need to run it again. On typical code that wasn’t written with concurrency in mind the typical answer is “not much would happen” because there are too many dependencies.
