Cellflow: A Parallel Application Development Environment with Run-Time Support for the Cell BE Processor

Martino Ruggiero, Michele Lombardi, Michela Milano, Luca Benini

Abstract: The Cell BE processor provides both scalable computation power and flexibility, and it is already being adopted for many computational intensive applications. Despite of its merits, it also presents many challenges, as it is now widely known that is very difficult to program the Cell BE in an efficient manner. Hence, the creation of an efficient software development framework is becoming the key challenge for this computational platform. We propose a novel software toolkit, called Cellflow, which enables developers to quickly build multi-task applications for Cell-based platform. We support programmers from the initial stage of their work, through a development-time software infrastructure, to the final stage of the application development, proposing a safe and easy-to-use explicit parallel programming model. Experimental results show that in Cellflow we reduced to minimum the abstraction gap between the optimization and development phases.