The fresh breeze project: A multi-core chip supporting composable parallel programming

The Fresh Breeze project concerns the architecture and design of a multicore chip that can achieve superior performance while supporting composability of parallel programs. The requirements of composability imply that the management of processor allocation and memory management must be sufficiently flexible to permit reassignment of resources according to the current needs of computations. The Fresh Breeze programming model combines the spawn/join threading model of Cilk with a write-once memory model based on fixed-size chunks that are allocated and freed by efficient hardware mechanisms. This model supports computing jobs by many users, each consisting of a hierarchy of function activations. The model satisfies all six principles for supporting modular program construction. Within this programming model, it is possible for any parallel program to be used, without change, as a component in building larger parallel programs.