Distributed Shared Memory for the Cell Broadband Engine (DSMCBE)

Abstract

The CELL-BE processor provides high performance and has been shown to reach a performance close to the theoretical peak, however, the high performance comes at the price of a quite complex programming model. Central to the complexity of the CELL-BE programming model is the need to move data in and out of non-coherent local storage blocks for each special processor element. In this paper we present a software library, namely the Distributed Shared Memory for the Cell Broadband Engine (DSMCBE). By using techniques known from distributed shared memory DSMCBE allows programmers to program the CELL-BE with relative ease and in addition scale their applications to use multiple CELL-BE processors in a network. Performance experiments show that a quite high performance can be obtained with DSMCBE even in a cluster environment.