<p>The Cell Broadband Engine processor is a powerful processor capable of over 220 GFLOPS. It is highly specialized and can be controlled in detail by the programmer. The Cell is significantly more complicated to program than a standard homogeneous multi core processor such as the Intel Core2 Duo and Quad. This thesis explores the possibility to abstract some of the complexities of Cell programming while maintaining high performance. The abstraction is achieved through a library of parallel skeletons implemented in the bulk synchronous parallel programming environment NestStep. The library includes constructs for user defined SIMD optimized data parallel skeletons such as map, reduce and more. The evaluation of the library includes porting of a vector based scientific computation program from sequential C code to the Cell using the library and the NestStep environment. The ported program shows good performance when compared to the sequential original code run on a high-end x86 processor. The evaluation also shows that a dot product implemented with the skeleton library is faster than the dot product in the IBM BLAS library for the Cell processor with more than two slave processors.</p><p> </p>

The Cell Broadband Engine processor is a powerful processor capable of over 220 GFLOPS. It is highly specialized and can be controlled in detail by the programmer. The Cell is significantly more complicated to program than a standard homogeneous multi core processor such as the Intel Core2 Duo and Quad. This thesis explores the possibility to abstract some of the complexities of Cell programming while maintaining high performance. The abstraction is achieved through a library of parallel skeletons implemented in the bulk synchronous parallel programming environment NestStep. The library includes constructs for user defined SIMD optimized data parallel skeletons such as map, reduce and more. The evaluation of the library includes porting of a vector based scientific computation program from sequential C code to the Cell using the library and the NestStep environment. The ported program shows good performance when compared to the sequential original code run on a high-end x86 processor. The evaluation also shows that a dot product implemented with the skeleton library is faster than the dot product in the IBM BLAS library for the Cell processor with more than two slave processors.

<p>The goal of this project is to create a source-to-source compiler which will translate NestStep code to C code. The compiler's job is to replace NestStep constructs with a series of function calls to the NestStep runtime system. NestStep is a parallel programming language extension based on the BSP model. It adds constructs for parallel programming on top of an imperative programming language. For this project, only constructs extending the C language are relevant. The output code will compile to form an executable program that runs on the multicore processor Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE). The NestStep runtime system has been ported to the Cell BE and is available from start of this project.</p>

<p>NestStep is a collection of parallel extensions to existing programming languages. These extensions supports a shared memory model and nested parallelism. NestStep is based the Bulk-Synchronous Programming model. Most of the communication of data in NestStep takes place in a</p><p>combine/commit phase, which is essentially a reduction followed by a broadcast.</p><p>The primary aim of the project that this thesis is based on was to develop a runtime system for NestStep-C, the extensions for the C programming language. The secondary aim was to find which tree structure among a selected few is the best for communicating data in the combine/commit phase.</p><p>This thesis includes information about NestStep, how to interface with the NestStep runtime system, some example applications and benchmarks for determining the best tree structure. A binomial tree structure and trees similar to it was empirically found to yield the best performance.</p>

NestStep is a collection of parallel extensions to existing programming languages. These extensions supports a shared memory model and nested parallelism. NestStep is based the Bulk-Synchronous Programming model. Most of the communication of data in NestStep takes place in a combine/commit phase, which is essentially a reduction followed by a broadcast. The primary aim of the project that this thesis is based on was to develop a runtime system for NestStep-C, the extensions for the C programming language. The secondary aim was to find which tree structure among a selected few is the best for communicating data in the combine/commit phase. This thesis includes information about NestStep, how to interface with the NestStep runtime system, some example applications and benchmarks for determining the best tree structure. A binomial tree structure and trees similar to it was empirically found to yield the best performance.

The goal of this project is to create a source-to-source compiler which will translate NestStep code to C code. The compiler's job is to replace NestStep constructs with a series of function calls to the NestStep runtime system. NestStep is a parallel programming language extension based on the BSP model. It adds constructs for parallel programming on top of an imperative programming language. For this project, only constructs extending the C language are relevant. The output code will compile to form an executable program that runs on the multicore processor Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE). The NestStep runtime system has been ported to the Cell BE and is available from start of this project.