CTK: Cell ToolKit Library

An open source C/C++ toolkit library for the Cell

CTK is an open-source C/C++ toolkit library for the Cell/B.E. processor. CTK is intended to accelerate Cell software development by providing various utility functions that most Cell programmers would need. CTK provides a set of common APIs for libspe, libspe2 and libspere (TOSHIBA's SPE library), and virtually enables "write-once, run everywhere" concept over several multiple Cell development environments. CTK also provides SPE Task runtime and library functions to facilitate more SPE-centric style programming, as utilizing SPEs is the key to increase performance in Cell/B.E. programming.

2008/01/08: [New] Version 0.73 is available! source code / API docs
2007/09/19: Version 0.72 is available! source code / API docs
2007/07/02: Version 0.71 source code and API docs are available!
2007/06/15: The first public version, version 0.7 source code and API docs are released.

What's new in Version 0.73 (since Version 0.72):

• Fixed compilation errors against IBM Cell SDK 3.0.
• Fixed configure and m4 scripts. Now the 'configure' script handles "--host" and "--build" options properly (hopefully). It also takes care of the value of CHOST variable.
• Fixed other compilation errors / minor bugs.

Mandelbrot sample results

Simple ray-trace sample results

CTK's API includes:

• Basic SPE execution control (SPE context, SPE thread and thread group)
• Inter-processor element Sync primitives (mutex, semaphore, queue and et al)
• Light-weight SPE overlay task control which facilitates SPE-centric programming (SPE tasks can execute another task, spawn another task, yield processor resource to other tasks and et al)
• DMA helpers (multi-buffering, unaligned DMA transfer, 2D DMA transfer and et al)
• SPE function object template (An SPE program can be written and invoked as if it were just a simple function)
• PS3 Frame-buffer utility, and
• Other several convenient utility routines which would be needed by most Cell programmers

Important links:

• Official home page is: http://cell.fixstars.com/ctk (Japanese only)
• The sourceforge project page is: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ctk-dev

The software is mainly developed and maintained by people who work for Fixstars Corporation, though it is not a product of the company and Fixstars provides NO WARRANTY on this software.
This project was supported by IPA (Japan Information-technology Promotion Agency) since Jun 2006 to Feb 2007.