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

Perez, Josep M.; Bellens, Pieter; Badía, Rosa M.; Labarta, Jesús

doi:10.1147/rd.515.0593

Cited by 99 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…The Cell Superscalar (CellSs) framework [16] enables the developer to identify blocks of code that would benefit from execution on the SPE cores and then automatically schedules task blocks on the appropriate core type, by employing a task dependency graph. However, the developer must decide ahead of time which core type to use for a given piece of code, reducing flexibility in moving a thread's execution to a different core type dynamically at runtime as workload requirements change.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hera-JVM

McIlroy

Sventek

2010

Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications

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Heterogeneous multi-core processors, such as the IBM Cell processor, can deliver high performance. However, these processors are notoriously difficult to program: different cores support different instruction set architectures, and the processor as a whole does not provide coherence between the different cores' local memories.We present Hera-JVM, an implementation of the Java Virtual Machine which operates over the Cell processor, thereby making this platforms more readily accessible to mainstream developers. Hera-JVM supports the full Java language; threads from an unmodified Java application can be simultaneously executed on both the main PowerPCbased core and on the additional SPE accelerator cores. Migration of threads between these cores is transparent from the point of view of the application, requiring no modification to Java source code or bytecode. Hera-JVM supports the existing Java Memory Model, even though the underlying hardware does not provide cache coherence between the different core types.We examine Hera-JVM's performance under a series of real-world Java benchmarks from the SpecJVM, Java Grande and Dacapo benchmark suites. These benchmarks show a wide variation in relative performance on the different core types of the Cell processor, depending upon the nature of their workload. Execution of these benchmarks on Hera-JVM can achieve speedups of up to 2.25x by using one of the Cell processor's SPE accelerator cores, compared to execution on the main PowerPC-based core. When all six SPE cores are exploited, parallel workloads can achieve speedups of up to 13x compared to execution on the single PowerPC core.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hera-JVM

McIlroy

Sventek

2010

Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications

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“…Although several middleware frameworks were developed for the Cell processor [13][14], most of them assume a strict data parallel model or adhere to pure C programming; while others provide only a minimal set of functionality of a standard library for specific applications. These issues limit their applicability to complex object-oriented PDES systems.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring Multi-Grained Parallelism in Compute-Intensive DEVS Simulations

Liu

Wainer

2010

2010 IEEE Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation

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Abstract-We propose a computing technique for efficient parallel simulation of compute-intensive DEVS models on the IBM Cell processor, combining multi-grained parallelism and various optimizations to speed up the event execution. Unlike most existing parallelization strategies, our approach explicitly exploits the massive fine-grained event-level parallelism inherent in the simulation process, while most of the logical processes are virtualized, making the achievable parallelism more deterministic and predictable. Together, the parallelization and optimization strategies produced promising experimental results, accelerating the simulation of a 3D environmental model by a factor of up to 33.06. The proposed methods can also be applied to other multicore and shared-memory architectures.

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“…The task is rather non-trivial due to the complexity of the DAGs of dense matrix factorizations (Figure 2.6). One framework capable of such scheduling on the Cell B. E. is the Cell Superscalar (CellSs) project from the Barcelona Supercomputer Center [1,15]. Unfortunately, due to the overheads of dynamically scheduling complex DAGs, the software is still not competitive, in terms of performance, with the approach presented here.…”

Section: Parallelization-single Cell B Ementioning

confidence: 99%