A Skeleton library for Cell Broadband Engine

• Main Author: Ålind, Markus
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för datavetenskap 2008
• Subjects: NestStep; Cell; BlockLib; skeleton programming; parallel programming; Software Engineering; Programvaruteknik
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-54476

The Cell Broadband Engine processor is a powerful processor capable of over 220 GFLOPS. It is highly specialized and can be controlled in detail by the programmer. The Cell is significantly more complicated to program than a standard homogeneous multi core processor such as the Intel Core2 Duo and Quad. This thesis explores the possibility to abstract some of the complexities of Cell programming while maintaining high performance. The abstraction is achieved through a library of parallel skeletons implemented in the bulk synchronous parallel programming environment NestStep. The library includes constructs for user defined SIMD optimized data parallel skeletons such as map, reduce and more. The evaluation of the library includes porting of a vector based scientific computation program from sequential C code to the Cell using the library and the NestStep environment. The ported program shows good performance when compared to the sequential original code run on a high-end x86 processor. The evaluation also shows that a dot product implemented with the skeleton library is faster than the dot product in the IBM BLAS library for the Cell processor with more than two slave processors.