A Methodology for Migration of Software from Single-core to Multi-core Machine

Hardware and software are not going hand in glove with each other; hardware is growing at a faster rate. Now we are having multiprocessor machines compared to having a single processor machines few years ago. The legacy programs which were developed on this single processor machine are not coping with the advancement of hardware technology. So there is an upsurge interest in migrating legacy systems to new hardware platforms and to new software development paradigm. High maintenance cost, lack of documentation and frequent transition of engineers/developers are among the challenges facing software organizations/software engineers who wish to migrate to newer systems. This paper proposes a methodology for restructuring the single threaded procedure oriented programs to a multi-threaded program(s) in the same relative abstraction level in the form of automatic and semi-automatic techniques. Here the program is divided into chunks of smaller programs called slices, and these are converted into threads which can be executed in parallel on different cores on a multi core machine. This leads to better utilization of available cores and efficiency of the program also increases.