A streaming computation framework for the Cell processor, M.Eng

The Cell architecture is a heterogeneous, distributed-memory multicore architecture that features a novel on-chip communication network. Stream programs are particu-larly well-suited for execution on Cell. This thesis implements a runtime library on Cell specifically designed to sup-port streaming applications and streaming language compilers. The runtime library abstracts the details of Cell's communication network and provides facilities that sim-plify the task of scheduling stream actors. The library is designed in the context of the StreamIt programming language. This library is used to implement a dynamic scheduling framework. The pro-grammability of high-level schedulers with and without the library is analyzed. We observe that the library does not add significant overhead, provides a number of useful features for schedulers, and greatly simplifies the code required to implement schedulers