CellFS: Taking the “DMA” out of Cell programming

In this paper we present a new programming model for the Cell BE architecture called CellFS. CellFS aims to simplify the task of managing I/O between the local store of the synergistic processing units and main memory of the Cell. The CellFS support library provides the means for transferring data via simple file I/O operations therefore eliminating the need for programmers to handle DMA transfers explicitly. The CellFS programming also provides overlap between code execution and data transfer by means of a deterministic, lock-less concurrency model.