A memory access technology is proposed to solve the problems of programming and performance caused by explicit management for multi-level memory hierarchies of Cell broadband engine architecture(CBEA). The access to main memory on CBEA is classified into two major types: bulk data transfer and on-demand data transfer. For bulk data transfer

the overhead of on-chip memory access is reduced by proper organization of data buffer. Meanwhile

a software-managed cache supporting coarse-grained access and data pre-fetch are adopted to enhance the performance of on-demand off-chip data transfer. In order to facilitate programming

a memory access library based on the proposed methods is implemented. Experimental results show that the performance of applications based on the proposed bulk data transfer technology is about 30%-50% higher than that of applications based on ALF and CellSs. For on-demand data transfer

the proposed software-managed cache performs about 20%-30% better than that of CBE SDK does

and the data prefetch technology based on four-buffer gets about 50% performance increase compared to single-buffer cache.