Paper Details

%T Using occam\-pi Primitives with the Cell Broadband Engine
%A Damian J. Dimmich
%E Alistair A. McEwan, Steve Schneider, Wilson Ifill, Peter H. Welch
%B Communicating Process Architectures 2007
%X The Cell Broadband Engine has a unique non\-heterogeneous
   archi\- tecture, consisting of an on\-chip network of one
   general purpose PowerPC pro\- cessor (the PPU), and eight
   dedicated vector processing units (the SPUs). These
   processors are interconnected by a high speed ring bus,
   enabling the use of different logical network topologies.
   When programming the Cell Broadband Engine using languages
   such as C, a developer is faced with a number of
   chal\- lenges. For instance, parallel execution and
   synchronisation between proces\- sors, as well as
   concurrency on individual processors, must be explicitly,
   and carefully, managed. It is our belief that languages
   explicitly supporting concur\- rency are able to offer much
   better abstractions for programming architectures such as
   the Cell Broadband Engine. Support for running occam\-
   programs on the Cell Broadband Engine has existed in the
   Transterpreter for some time. This support has however
   not featured efficient inter\-processor communication and
   barrier synchronisation, or automatic deadlock detection.
   We discuss some of the changes required to the occam\-
   scheduler to support these features on the Cell Broadband
   Engine. The underlying on\-chip communication and
   synchronisation mechanisms are explored in the development
   of these new scheduling algorithms. Benchmarks of the
   communications performance are provided, as well as a
   discussion of how to use the occam\- language to
   distribute a program onto a Cell
   Broadband Engine&\[sh]8217;s processors. The
   Transterpreter runtime, which already has support for the
   Cell Broadband Engine, is used as the platform for these
   experiments. The Transterpreter can be found at
   www.transterpreter.org.

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