Android$^\mathrm{TM}$ development and performance analysis

Abstract

The advent of emergent systems on chip and MPSocs opens a new era in the small mobile devices (Smartphones, Tablets,...) in terms of computing capabilities and applications to be addressed. Currently, these devices have multicore processors and GPUs which provide high computational power. The efficient use of such devices, including the parallel power, is still a challenge for general-purpose programmers. In the last years Android has become the dominant platform in the small mobile devices. In addition, it has a large community of developers. For application development, Android provides two development kits, the Software Development Kit and Native Development Kit. To exploit the high computational capabilities on current devices, Android provides Renderscript, an API that allows the execution of parallel applications and it is designed to be used in applications that require high computing power. The development model used involves an important impact in the performance of the applications. In this paper, we address the evaluation of the performance on Android platforms. A set of benchmark applications has been implemented to evaluate the performance of the different development models. Sequential and parallel versions of the different development kits are considered in the computational experience. This benchmark and the computational experience achieved are greatly helpful to the programmer for understanding sources of overhead and bottlenecks in the developed code.