%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.