Cellflow: a Parallel Application Development Environment with Run-Time Support for the Cell BE Processor

The Cell BE processor provides both scalable computation power and flexibility, and it is already being adopted for many computa-tional intensive applications. Despite of its merits, it also presents many challenges, as it is now widely known that is very difficult to program the Cell BE in an efficient manner. Hence, the creation of an efficient software development framework is becoming the key challenge for this computational platform. We propose a novel software toolkit, called Cellflow, which en-ables developers to quickly build multi-task applications for Cell-based platform. We support programmers from the initial stage of their work, through a development-time software infrastructure, to the final stage of the application development, proposing a safe and easy-to-use explicit parallel programming model. Experimental results show that in Cellflow we reduced to min-imum the abstraction gap between the optimization and develop-ment phases. 1