Jack Rabbit

The Cell processor is an example of the trade-ös made when designing a mass market power e¿cient 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 e¿ciency, and load balance. Several attempts have been made to produce e¿cient and e¿ective programming systems for Cell, but the attempts have been too specialized and thus fall short. We present Jack Rabbit, an e¿cient thread pool work queue implementation, with load balancing mechanisms and double bu¿ering. Our system incurs low threading overhead, gets good load balance, and achieves bandwidth e¿ciency. Our system represents a step towards an e¿ective way to program Cell and any similar current or future processors.