Question for Arduino DUE designers - Parallel programming

Official Hardware Mega Due
1

Good morning,

I am wondering if there is a way to have some kind of parallel programming for two or more Arduino Due boards.
I am using this new board for a while and I find it really powerful.
I found really great its way of interrupt handling.
I would like to see, in the future, a stackable version of the Due board with dedicated bus for two or more processors and language primitives for shared memory access and hardware thread support.
This would open new programming opportunities.

It would be nice having community and designers' opinions.
Thank you very much and best regards

Enzo
(Italy)

2

I'm not sure if what i have is the same as what you're asking.

But if you mean interfacing with two Due's, yes you can here's a link that shows you how that is possible.

http://fritzing.org/projects/interfacing-due-with-due-through-i2c

You have to program one as a slave and the other as master.

3

Really, parallel processing is only useful in some niche applications where there is a genuine advantage to using a parallel algorithm, or you have reached the thermal limit for an air cooled silicon CPU (somewhere around 4GHz?) and still need more power.

Otherwise, it is simpler and cheaper to use a CPU that is twice as fast than to cobble together two slower CPUs. There is already Galileo, but hopefully Tre will be better (and faster).

Granted, there are educational reasons for exploring parallel processing, but I would start with a system designed for parallel processing, like xCORE

4

Thank a lot for your answers.
What I mean is a really parallel processing where each process has it's own associated thread(s) with its own memory and its own interrupts. Timing determinism is what I would like to have. An higher speed processor could not always grantees this.
At the moment I am working with arduino due and a hardware device connected via ethernet port.
From ethernet port I have to parse two one-way udp data flow and one two-way tcp/ip data flow. Each data flow can generate events (interrupt) that have to be handled via display messages or updates to the user interfaces. From user interface I can send TCP/IP commands to the device.
Even if execution is faster than that of a mega board some packets are still lost.
Probably a multi threaded approach could resolve the issue as each thread could manage its own event queue and could have a better organized code with semaphores usage.
xCore variant with all Arduino's facilities would be a better solution.