Balancing productivity and performance on the cell broadband engine

— The Cell Broadband Engine (BE) is a heterogeneous multicore processor, combining a general-purpose POWER architecture core with eight independent single-instructionmultiple-data (SIMD) cores. Each core is capable of very high performance; however, users must explicitly manage data movement, scheduling, and synchronization. While these attributes provide some of the Cell processor’s greatest performance strengths, they also form its greatest weaknesses in terms of developer productivity, code portability, and initial performance efficiencies. In this paper, we evaluate productivity and relative performance improvements of a Cell BE system for a diverse set of kernels and applications. Our experimental workload includes algorithms from scientific, cognitive, and imaging problem domains. Our results demonstrate that the Cell processor could be several times faster than a SSE-enabled, contemporary dual-core processor, and could sustain a high performance-to-productivity ratio. We out...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CLUSTER
• Authors: Sadaf R. Alam, Jeremy S. Meredith, Jeffrey S. Vetter
• Keywords: Cell Processor, CLUSTER 2007, Cluster Computing, Heterogeneous Multicore Processor, Processor’s Greatest Performance