Automatic Conversion of Source Code for Multi Core Architecture

Abstract

As personal computers have become more prevalent and more applications have been designed for them, the end-user has seen the need for a faster, more capable system to keep up with new applications. Speedup has been achieved by increasing clock speeds and, more recently, adding multiple processing cores to the same chip. The clock speeds of processors have reached physical limit, so multi cores are seen as vi- able way to increase the performance. IBM, in collaboration with Sony Computer Entertainment and Toshiba Corporation, established a relationship with the primary objective of developing a new processor with dramatically increased performance, re- sponsiveness and security. The result of the relationship is Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) technology, an advanced IBM Power Architecture technology-based mi- croprocessor. The Cell/B.E. processor is an asymmetric multi-core processor that is optimized for parallel processing and streaming applications. Though originally developed for gam- ing application, it is found to be useful for general purpose computing. The problem is, there is no application in market readily available with these library functions and can use all the processor of the architecture. The main objective of this thesis is to develop software, which is able to identify independent execution tasks and converts automatically in such a way that the modi ed code executes parallel on di erent cores and give the better performance. This thesis work is mainly concentrated on the computational part of the source code. Report contains general study of the Cell BE architecture, SDK tool kit, di er- ent methods to get performance bene t, implementation of intermediate tool to nd out functions and their dependencies from the source code and the implementation of the complete algorithm, testing and analysis of the developed software.