CellSs: Making it easier to program the Cell Broadband Engine processor

Abstract

With the appearance of new multicore processor architectures, there is a need for new programming paradigms, especially for heterogeneous devices such as the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.) processor. CellSs is a programming model that addresses the automatic exploitation of functional parallelism from a sequential application with annotations. The focus is on the flexibility and simplicity of the programming model. Although the concept and programming model are general enough to be extended to other devices, its current implementation has been tailored to the Cell/B.E. device. This paper presents an overview of CellSs and a newly implemented scheduling algorithm. An analysis of the results—both performance measures and a detailed analysis with performance analysis tools—was performed and is presented here.