@InProceedings{Dimmich07,
  title =        "{U}sing occam-pi {P}rimitives with the {C}ell {B}roadband {E}ngine",
  author=        "Dimmich,  Damian J.",
  editor=        "McEwan,  Alistair A. and Schneider,  Steve and Ifill,  Wilson and Welch, Peter H.",
  pages =        "507--508",
  booktitle=     "{C}ommunicating {P}rocess {A}rchitectures 2007",
  isbn=          "978-1-58603-767-3",
  year=          "2007",
  month=         "jul",
  abstract=      "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\&\#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."
}