A component-based framework for the Cell Broadband Engine

With the increasing trend of microprocessor manufacturers to rely on parallelism to increase their products´ performance, there is an associated increasing need for simple techniques to leverage this hardware parallelism for good application performance. Unfortunately, many application developers do not have the benefit of long experience in programming parallel and distributed systems. While the filter-stream programming paradigm helps bridge the gap between developers of scientific applications and the performance they need, current and future high-performance multicore processor designs do not have a filter-stream programming library available. This work aims to fill that gap in the software world. This initial DataCutter-Lite implementation defines a powerful, but simple abstraction for carrying out complex computations in a filter-stream model. Additionally, the initial implementation shows that complex architectures such as the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture can make use of the filter-stream model, and give good application performance when doing so.