SysCellC: SystemC on Cell

High performance computing with low cost machines becomes a reality. As an example, the Sony playstation3 gaming console offers performances up to 150 gflops for a machinepsilas retail price of $400. Unfortunately, higher performances are achieved when the programmer exploits the architectural specificities of its Cell processor: he has to focus on inter-processor communications, task allocations among the processors, task scheduling, external memory prefetching, and synchronization. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a compile flow that automates the transformation of a program expressed with the high level system design language SystemC used as a programming model, to its implementation on the Cell processor. SystemC constructs and scheduler are directly mapped to the Cell API, preserving their semantic. Inter-processor and external memory communications are abstracted by means of SystemC channels. We illustrate the approach on two case studies implemented on a Sony Playstation 3.