Live Webcast 15th Annual Charm++ Workshop

The Charm++ programming model has mainly been used to develop applications in the realm of High Performance Computing (HPC). As such, many Charm++ applications have tremendous need for computational power to perform their respective calculations/simulations in a reasonable amount of time. IBM, Sony, and Toshiba have recently developed the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA or just Cell for short). Cell-based platforms are attractive platforms for Charm++ applications because of the enormous amount of computational power a single Cell processor can deliver. However, because the design of the CBEA differs from traditional processor architectures, the Cell is difficult to program using traditional programming methods and languages. The work presented here represents the initial efforts in porting Charm++ applications to the Cell processor. An interface, called the Offload API, has been developed which allows Charm++ applications to offload work onto the Cells SPEs. The Offload API has been designed to be an easy-to-use interface which will increase the productivity of programmers without sacrificing performance. By using the Offload API, Charm++ applications can utilize the SPEs. While the Offload API has been developed with the Charm++ programming model in mind, it can be used by any C/C++ application to offload work to the SPEs. Example programs which use the Offload API, both C/C++ based and Charm++ based, have been written and shown to correctly execute.