DDM-Cell: Data-Driven Multithreading on the Cell Processor

Cell Broadband Engine is a new heterogeneous multi-core chip processor designed to provide a high computational power on a single chip. The advent of multi-core chips posed a challenge for a suitable programming and execution model that exploits this new technology. This challenge is greater with Cell, because of the different properties it has compared to other multi-core systems. In this paper we provide an overview of a work-in-progress in which we argue that DataDriven Multithreading (DDM), a non-blocking multithreading model that decouples computation and synchronization and allows them to execute asynchronously, is a suitable model to be used with Cell. We justify this by illustrating that both DDM and Cell are compatible on many aspects, as our preliminary analysis has shown, especially in the approaches they both utilize to achieve better performance. Finally, we provide an overview of our preliminary implementation of the DDM model on the Cell processor, which we call DDM-Cell.