Jack Rabbit

The Cell processor is an example of the trade-offs made when designing a mass market power efficient multi-core machine, but the machine-exposing architecture and raw communication mechanisms of Cell are hard to manage for a programmer. Cell’s design is simple and causes software complexity to go up in the areas of achieving low threading overhead, good bandwidth efficiency, and load balance. Several attempts have been made to produce efficient and effective programming systems for Cell, but the attempts have been too specialized and thus fall short. We present Jack Rabbit, an efficient thread pool work queue implementation, with load balancing mechanisms and double buffering. Our system incurs low threading overhead, gets good load balance, and achieves bandwidth efficiency. Our system represents a step towards an effective way to program Cell and any similar current or future processors.

Apollo Isaac Orion Ellis received the B.A. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2008, and graduated with a Master's of Science in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in May 2011. His interests include computer graphics and parallel systems, and he is currently employed by Intel Corp.