CAFE: A Framework for Cell Application Development

The IBM Cell processor is a heterogeneous multi-core architecture designed to demonstrate exceptional levels of performance improvement for compute-intensive applications. The streamlined design of its Synergistic Processing Units (i.e. Small local store, no cache, limited branch prediction, no dynamic instruction reordering) presents a new set of challenges for application developers as they are now required to explicitly control the flow of data amongst the processors. Therefore, in this paper the authors introduce a lightweight, flexible framework library called Cell Architecture Framework and Extensions (CAFE) to assist developers in taking advantage of this computational power without forcing a single programming model onto their applications.