Implementation and Evaluation of Program Development Middleware for Cell Broadband Engine Clusters

摘要

Although PC clusters with multi-core accelerators have become popular, it is still difficult to write efficient parallel programs because two types of programming techniques of are required: multi-thread programming and inter-node programming. The former requires special techniques and training dedicated to the accelerator, while the latter urges programmers to be skilled in using communication libraries such as mpich or OpenMPI. In order to reduce such programming cost, in this report, we propose a program development middleware which targets a PC cluster consisting of multiple nodes with Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.). This middleware supports inter-node and inter-core thread control, so it lets developers to focus on tuning a program to elicit computational power of each core in Cell/B.E processors. As a result of evaluating middleware by executing two types of benchmark programs, it could reduce 40% of code quantity compared to OpenMPI implementation, and provided approximately the same execution performance.