J-Cell

From Self-Organizing Systems Group

The goal of the J-Cell project is to develop a robust, highly scalable, distributed runtime environment for clusters of heterogeneous multi-core processors such as the IBM Cell processor. The scenario we have in mind is a dynamic system where nodes may enter and leave at any time. Therefore, it is not known in advance which resources will be available at a given time. To be able to gain a near-to-optimal utilization of the available resources at all times we use self-organization mechanisms. These are built into a virtual machine that hides the underlying heterogeneous topology and provides a single system image to the user.

One of the first project results is a Software Transactional Memory (STM) library that is particularly suited for distributed systems.