Cell software development: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 13:34, 19 October 2009

Revision as of 19:39, 1 December 2009

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==Linux on cell==

An open source software-based strategy was adopted to accelerate the development of a Cell BE ecosystem and to provide an environment to develop Cell applications, including a GCC-based Cell compiler, binutils and a port of the Linux operating system.<ref name="research.ibm.com">{{cite web|url=http://www.research.ibm.com/people/m/mikeg/papers/2007_ieeecomputer.pdf|format=PDF|title=An Open Source Environment for Cell Broadband Engine System Software|date=[[June 2007-06]]}}</ref>

==Software portability==

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Applications with high locality, such as dense matrix computations represent an ideal workload class for the local stores in Cell BE.

<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.research.ibm.com/people/m/mikeg/papers/2006_ieeemicro.pdf|format=PDF|title=Synergistic Processing in Cell's Multicore Architecture|date=[[March 2006-03]]}}</ref>

Streaming computations can be efficiently accommodated using software-pipelining of memory block transfers using a multi-buffering strategy.<ref name="research.ibm.com"/>

The software cache offers a solution for random accesses.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/451/eichenberger.pdf|format=PDF|title=Using advanced compiler technology to exploit the performance of the Cell Broadband Engine architecture|date=[[January 2006-01]]}}</ref>

More sophisticated applications can use multiple strategies for different data types.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/papers/2008_vee_cellgc.pdf|format=PDF|title=Cell GC: Using the Cell Synergistic Processor as a Garbage Collection Coprocessor |date=[[March 2008-03]]}}</ref>

==Compiler-mediated parallelism==