A Virtual SIMD Machine Approach for Abstracting Heterogeneous Multicore Processors

Abstract

The heterogeneous design of multi-core processors, such as the Cell processor, introduced new challenges in porting high-level languages. Our project is developing tools that hide the underlying details of the Cell processor and eases parallel programming. We present a Virtual SIMD machine (VSM) paradigm that can be used to parallelize array expression automatically. The novelty is the use of a virtual SIMD machine model to completely hide the underlying details required for programming the Cell processor. The VSM paradigm can also be used to develop an automatic parallelizing compiler for the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE). In this paper we give an overview of the VSM interface and present preliminary results that show the performance of our VSM and its behavior on multiple accelerator cores using basic arrays operations.