Software architecture and system validation of an open, unified model for accelerated multicore computing
by C. H. Crawford,
D. J. Burdick,
J. N. Dale,
E. F. Ford,
R. A. Mikosh,
A. Nobles,
and V. To
For systems that use hardware accelerators to combine multicore
and multiprocess technology with libraries and computational
kernels, the drawbacks are the complexity of the programming
model and the corresponding verification of the software and
validation of the system performance capabilities. In this paper, we
describe a software approach to utilizing the compute power of the
Cell Broadband Engine® processor and a cluster composed of
x86-64 and IBM PowerXCell™ 8i processors integrated within a
single hybrid compute node. We review past approaches to provide
motivation for our development of the Data Communication and
Synchronization (DaCS) library and Accelerated Library
Framework (ALF), which enable developers to create new
applications and adapt existing applications to exploit hybrid
computing platforms. We follow with examples of porting existing
x86-64 processor-based applications to the hybrid cluster platform
in order to demonstrate the capabilities of ALF and DaCS and
discuss how one application was extended to become a stress and
performance test for various system components. Finally, we
present the applicability of this programming model, accelerator
design, and test architecture to other system architectures,
applications, and workload segments.
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