#+title: Cashmere

[[https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1324230][file:https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.1324230.svg]]

* Introduction

Cashmere is a programming system for heterogeneous compute clusters with
many-core devices such as GPUs, something we call a compute jungle.
Heterogeneity refers to the fact that the compute cluster can contain many
different kinds of many-core devices with different processing speeds.
Cashmere makes it possible to achieve good scalability and performance on these
heterogeneous compute clusters.

Cashmere acts as a library on top of [[https://github.com/NLeSC/Constellation][Constellation]], a framework that schedules
loosely coupled activities by means of work stealing.  Cashmere operates on the
level of one node and is responsible for scheduling many-core kernels
efficiently onto may-core devices within the node.  In addition, it provides a
convenient interface for calling kernels.  In Cashmere, the kernels for the
many-core devices are written in [[https://github.com/JungleComputing/mcl][Many-Core Levels]] (MCL), a programming system
that allows one to write kernels for many-cores on multiple levels of
abstraction.  This allows programmers to trade off (control over) performance
and portability and maintainability of the code.

Cashmere is an open source project of the Computer Systems group of the
Computer Science department of the Faculty of Sciences at the Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.  Cashmere and Constellation are built
on the Ibis Portability Layer (IPL).  Ibis has its own web-site:
http://www.cs.vu.nl/ibis/ where you can find more Ibis documentation, papers,
application sources.

* History

In version 0.1.0, Cashmere was based on [[https://github.com/JungleComputing/satin][Satin]] that extends Java with Cilk like
primitives that make it very convenient for the programmer to write divide and
conquer style programs.  In its current version 0.2.0, Cashmere acts as a
library on top of [[https://github.com/NLeSC/Constellation][Constellation]].

* Building Cashmere

#+begin_src sh
git clone https://github.com/JungleComputing/cashmere.git
cd cashmere
./gradlew build
#+end_src