author: P. Jorrit Tijben
title: Improving a CellFS Implementation for the x86 Architecture
keywords: Coroutines, CellFS, Cell Broadband Engine Architecture, x86, pthreads, concurrency
topics:
committee: ?
end: June 2009

Abstract

With multi-core processors becoming mainstream, programmers are trying to take full advantage of their parallel possibilities. One of the relatively new and powerful multi-core CPUs is the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture, which excels at floating point calculations. To ease development on this platform suitable for supercomputing, frameworks have been created offering a range of programming models. One of these frameworks is CellFS. There has been progress on making CellFS available for the x86 architecture, providing a way to test and run code without the need for actual Cell hardware. CellFS on x86 supports coroutines using a straightforward implementation based on setcontext/getcontext. A different and perhaps more promising way to realize coroutines is using pthreads; the possibility and feasibility of such a solution is investigated.

Additional Resources

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