CellSs: a programming model for the cell BE architecture

ABSTRACT

In this work we present Cell superscalar (CellSs) which addresses the automatic exploitation of the functional parallelism of a sequential program through the different processing elements of the Cell BE architecture. The focus in on the simplicity and flexibility of the programming model. Based on a simple annotation of the source code, a source to source compiler generates the necessary code and a runtime library exploits the existing parallelism by building at runtime a task dependency graph. The runtime takes care of the task scheduling and data handling between the different processors of this heterogeneous architecture. Besides, a locality-aware task scheduling has been implemented to reduce the overhead of data transfers. The approach has been implemented and tested with a set of examples and the results obtained since now are promising.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.3 Concurrent Programming
          Subjects: Parallel programming

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.5 COMPUTER SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION
      C.5.1 Large and Medium ("Mainframe") Computers
          Subjects: Super (very large) computers

  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.4 Processors
          Subjects: Run-time environments; Code generation; Compilers

General Terms:
Design