Extending distributed shared memory for the cell broadband engine to a channel model

Abstract

As the performance gains from traditional processors decline, alternative processor designs are becoming available. One such processor is the CELL-BE processor, which theoretically can deliver a sustained performance close to 205 GFLOPS per processor[10]. Unfortunately, the high performance comes at the price of a quite complex programming model. In this paper we present an easy-to-use, CSP-like, communication method, which enables transfers of shared memory objects. The channel based communication method can significantly reduce the complexity of massively parallel programs. By implementing a few scientific computational cores we show that performance and scalability of the system is acceptable for most problems. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.